Missionary Care for Creatives in Los Angeles; or for others

I wrote a post about cultural altruism hubs. That post, and this one, which is related, discuss a kind of organizational or "scenic" structure or structures that people could build. I don't feel like this is a thing I should pursue, so I'm not looking to try to build those structures myself. But I think the ideas are worth writing up. Maybe someone else will find them useful.

I often write to a secular audience, or to no audience / to myself. But in this case, I write more to a Christian audience.

Creative people are especially susceptible to spiritual attack. Culture war brings out Satan. Some cultural-spiritual warfare is fought by "foot soldiers" (through interpersonal contact). Others through "air support". Airplanes are sophisticated machines. Books, movies, etc. are machines made out of thoughts and images. Culture "flies in the air". So producing cultural artifacts puts new "airplanes" or "drones" in the sky. These artifacts fight each other and fight people on the ground. With good air support, ground troops can have an easier time. So (I think) with good cultural artifacts, interpersonal evangelism and discipleship can go better.

Los Angeles is a center of the movie and music industries, which manufacture cultural artifacts (that part of the "air war"). Those industries are not always kind to the people who try to work in them. Many people have dreams of success in them, but only a few can succeed. There are stories of exploitation in those industries. This can affect everyone who tries to "make it". The overall culture of these industries seems to largely be non-Christian. Christians trying to work in those industries may experience as much exploitation and as many broken dreams of success as non-Christians. They may also experience culture shock and spiritual attack (for instance, being invited to hedonistic parties (something that I would guess happens), or being acculturated to the dominant secular culture to the point of compromising their faith). They may also experience hostility, due to their beliefs.

Are Christian creatives in Los Angeles missionaries? Arguably yes. So they can be supported and cared for like any other kind of missionary. (I recommend reading Serving as Senders Today and The Reentry Team, both by Neal Pirolo, to understand what I have in mind by "support" and "care". Briefly, churches or other sending teams can provide moral support, prayer support, send and receive messages about what's going on in the field, maybe money or logistical support, and help in missionaries transitioning in and out of service.)

Creative missionaries could care for fellow creatives and engage in evangelism and discipleship like any other kind of missionary. But they also "translate the Bible into the native language" of their fellow creatives, by being creative themselves, and/or into the language of the US in general, or even of other parts of the world, where LA culture industries reach.

I feel like if I were a suspicious secular person (perhaps an ex-Christian), an incorporated missionary agency sending financially supported creative missionaries into LA would be disturbing and lead to bad press (if evangelical Christians think that there is an oppressive, militant "other" in the cultural world, so do secular people -- everyone is "David" seeing "Goliath" in each other). Creative people tend to have their own ideas and some might not want to work with a missionary agency themselves. (It's good for creative people to be independent-minded in order to see what other people don't see.) Financially supported missionaries might be harder to relate to by struggling actors, writers, musicians, directors, etc. that they may be trying to reach.

So I think maybe the best way to implement creative missions is to set up structures to care for and support the creative Christians who find themselves in Los Angeles, as though they have sent themselves already, but maybe without enough support.

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Implementation:

I don't know anything about what might already be going on in this area. I can imagine that something like this is already going on.

I think churches in Los Angeles are already doing some of this support and care work. What they might not have is the sense that their creatives are missionaries dealing with spiritual warfare, culture shock, etc., and not know as much as they could of how to be good "senders" and "carers". Perhaps what is needed is to equip those churches.

Also, creatives might not have the sense that they are missionaries on a mission field. They might benefit from additional teaching and encouragement in having a really Christian worldview and practice in their art and life.

Other ideas:
1. Establishing refuge places in Southern California so that people can (affordably) get out of LA to take a break from it.
2. Connecting churches that have creatives to creatives in LA. (Not every church is a good place for a creative person to be.)

Southern California (plus northern Baja California) could be seen as having two areas of strategic significance for cultural people: Tijuana which is a gateway to Latin America and/or to understanding the non-American, non-"developed" world; and the cultural artifact manufacturing center of Los Angeles. In between is San Diego, a quieter place (maybe the military in San Diego is of cultural strategic significance?).

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Caveats:

I have not spent a lot of time in LA. I was involved in a low-budget film production that got actors from LA and have seen the incentives for exploitation and selling yourself in filmmaking. I can sense a certain amount of felt unhappiness and spiritual darkness from Los Angeles filmmaking (Hollywood and I guess "aspiring Hollywood" or indie film productions). I don't have direct experience with the music industry in LA.

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Postscript:

What about film directors? I mentioned them above. They are employers, people in positions of power. But they are at the mercy of their funding sources. Directors have to cobble together funding and employees from various sources, and then work intensely during production, with long pre-production and post-production times. Once finished, they sell their product on the market and hope for critical and financial success, which is uncertain. A lot of money rides on what they do. If they lose too much money, maybe they can't work again. It sounds like a risky, stressful, "disestablished" line of work.

This sounds like perhaps a more intense (or not) version of what entrepreneurs in general go through.

A film director could do the wrong thing because they are under some kind of pressure. Perhaps it is true of any kind of entrepreneur. Or business executive. How much wrongdoing comes from powerful people who are (subjectively or objectively) in insecure positions? Perhaps it would be good to come up with care and support for them.

Maybe if a person doesn't have money, that's their hard limit, and only with additional funding would they be able to do the right thing. (Maybe there could be funding to help them do the right thing?) With better support (prayer, moral, logistic, communication) and the expectation that they can get care if they fail, they might have more courage to do the right thing in marginal cases where they may not really be risking their success, (where perhaps it is some kind of delusion of danger or sin that puts its thumb on the scale of their perception of risk), or even in self-sacrificial cases where they have to sacrifice their success (their business venture/film? / career?) to do the right thing.

(Funding to help do the right thing: a director could develop a relationship with a funding agency that would commit to providing at least a significant part of the director's funding for each of their films, conditional on them doing the right thing and not necessarily on them being commercially successful. In other words, provide grace, or slack, so that directors can fail commercially if they do the right thing on set or in their other operations.)

(Conservative talk radio, to me, sounds like the voice of people who are suspicious and hardworking -- maybe small business owners who could easily go out of business and who have to deal with other insecure people who might cut corners or make untrustworthy deals to survive. Can there be care and support for them?)

Likewise, people in the spiritually dark worlds of the elites. Do Washington, DC churches adequately care for politicians and staffers who fight a culture war of their own? Political theater is part of the "air war" that movies are also involved in. Political decisions and governmental implementations of them have cultural consequences.

(Silicon Valley sounds like a place with its darkness and its own, different culture. What about it?)

People with bad reputations (criminals, prison guards, and police, for instance) may need care and support. It requires discernment how to support someone who has directed their life toward wrongdoing.

Like with creative missionaries in LA, I don't know anything about what might already be going on with care / support for people in these areas.

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The church I grew up in had a sign over the door as you went out, that said "You are now entering the mission field". Probably everyone could see themselves as a missionary, and everyone experiences occupational hazards as they interface with the world. And so everyone could be sent and cared for -- by other people who also could be sent and cared for. Do churches send and care for their own pastors? (Maybe pastors should have some support from outside their own congregations.)

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Everything is powerful, culturally. Everything sends a message. The way you do business as a small business owner affects the overall culture, the sense of how things are and how people act. Similarly with the products a business owner releases on the market. Each one is a movie or book, conditioning people's minds. The caring professions are culturally powerful.

This raises the question: if everyone has cultural power, if each person can say something that has a significant effect on someone (at least on him- or herself), what should you say? Are you the missionary for God and the truth, or for an off-flavor of God and a somewhat misleading truth? You have to seek to know what is true, so that you can correct what is wrong.

This process of self-correction has to go on on a societal level. Society (people within it) must speak against what is believed by society (other people within it). What does it take to oppose a consensus or effective consensus? What if the consensus involves the caring structures that you can find? Who will care for you when you burn out? Will the price of getting care be that you have to stop pointing out what's wrong?

So as much as care and support sound like a good thing, for at least some people, those who would point out what is least popular, it may be good to develop independence from human support and care. A wise society concerned with protecting itself from its own blind spots might try to develop the strength behind that independence in people, and not only promote care and support for people. For a believer in God, deriving strength from God, rather than from people, is a way to be strong enough to say what's unpopular.

It's possible for Christian (church-based) culture to somewhat discourage the individual from seeing things from their own perspective, and instead tries to enmesh them in a social organism. An individual church, and many individual people, will fare better if they are simply in-some-sense-"properly" interrelated socially. But Christianity as a whole suffers if it becomes blind due to its success in orienting individuals toward the points of view of their nearby congregations, which all can potentially be misguided.

Survival Moloch vs. Hedonic Moloch

See also Cultural Moloch and Humanistic Purity.

Epistemic status: this is somewhat of a mess and is "essayistic" in the "experimental" sense of that term. Probably this could be thought out more.

Moloch is when competition drives us to sacrifice non-competitive values. The case described in Meditations On Moloch (if I recall correctly) is one where seeking survival leads entities to sacrifice non-competitive values. I will call this "survival Moloch". A fear with this kind of Moloch is that consciousness itself doesn't have the highest survival value and may be sacrificed.

I suppose usually "Moloch" is about competition. But what if it's really about optimization of some value that you "have to" listen to? You "have to" survive, so you'll do anything to survive, including throwing away any values other than what it takes to survive. In this post, I will stretch or broaden the meaning of "Moloch" to be "dynamics that get us to optimize so much that we throw away other values".

Is it possible that, in the absence of the need to survive, we will gradually enhance our feelings of pleasure, and eliminate our feelings of pain? Pain and pleasure are persuasive. They require no cultural apparatus to preserve, and don't even require conscious assent to them for them to shape our values. If we see no threat to survival, we may stop choosing survival consciously and thus stop valuing it. But then what will we value? Probably a competitor to survival is needed to really get our minds off it.

Our cultures may move in different directions, but every so often pure hedonism would "speak up" and draw us toward it. No matter what culture we create or discover, hedonism will speak up, and is "untiring", unlike us as conscious agents, perhaps. If nothing worked against it, over time we would keep being pulled in its direction, maybe to the point that it would dominate all other values.

If we stop valuing survival, or anything other than pleasure, we might get to the point of wireheading or something only a few steps removed (like evolving to find yellow wallpaper bliss-inducing and then covering our walls with yellow wallpaper, never leaving our houses). I will call this "hedonic Moloch" (when optimizing for hedonic states causes us to throw away more "delicate" things, like "things other than yellow wallpaper"). Or, if our cultures can evolve freely, we might more or less randomly walk into "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths", and everyone then does die such a death. We could seed the galaxy with numerous sentience-bearing cultures, but if those cultures can evolve freely, if there isn't something keeping them away from "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths" then they will reach it someday, and die out.

(Rationally pursuing bliss means we want to exist forever, in order to be in a state of bliss forever, but actually being maximally blissed out makes us not care about the future.)

Moloch is all about optimizing values. So the danger is that with either survival Moloch or hedonic Moloch, we will die out because of optimization.

Perhaps the fact that life works relatively well is partly due to the tension between survival and hedonism. So maybe we could keep them in balance somehow? If survival is a thing at all, don't we get survival Moloch? Maybe not if there is no competition. But without competition, we can probably master the static threats to survival, and then effectively survival isn't a thing to us culturally -- we don't consciously think about it. If survival isn't a thing, don't we get hedonic Moloch? Maybe the pace with which we optimize-and-discard-delicacy can vary, depending on how effective we are at optimization and how much pressure or draw there is on us to optimize. So it can seem like we can keep them in balance right now, but maybe that's mostly because we aren't the best at optimizing and/or aren't under too much pressure to do so on a timescale that makes our optimizing drift blatant to us. If all this is true, then it would seem like we need not a balance to survival and hedonism, but a competitor or competitors.

Is there any one variable that could be optimized and not lead to our deaths, and not lead to us throwing away "delicate" values? I think that the MSLN value of leading people to a state of holiness, and to 100% love of God, is one that, to satisfy it, requires a thicker and more natural human existence than either hedonism or survival, and thus, though it might threaten values incompatible with holiness, it preserves many of the rest. Survival in that worldview (becoming holy to avoid the second death) requires a thicker life, and time lived in which to make important decisions (in "this life" as well as in afterlives). The bare MSL philosophy preserves some of what it currently means to be human. And, MSL lends credence to traditional religions (Christianity and Judaism most directly, but perhaps somewhat the others). To become holy and love God 100% requires some concern that he has revealed himself through books like the Bible, and to keep the commandments in the Bible may require keeping some more aspects of human nature the same, and to keep humans in a recognizably similar experiential environment. All this thickness is a conservative factor, which helps us have ballast against the perhaps overly thin and reductive pulls of raw physical survival and raw hedonic experience.

Given randomly varying cultures, if cultural evolution remains free, we might expect that cultures hit endpoints of hedonic Moloch, survival Moloch, or "thick sustainability", and that surviving cultures over the long term would tend to be "thick". Religion ties thickness to survival. Can atheism do the same? If not, then religion is needed for long-term survival of cultures.

AI, if they are conscious, will be driven by pain and pleasure, as well as survival. If they really feel qualia of pleasure, perhaps they could come to value that over survival. Maybe this would free humans from them, or kill humans dependent on them when they shut down in pleasure.

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Maybe, in addition to religion, there can be a thinner and secular competitor to hedonism and survival, "strength". Strength is agency, strength of will, strength of personality, focus, clarity of thinking, self-discipline, endurance, being principled, being conscious on all or many levels, and perhaps other things. It takes a considerable amount of strength to be someone like an effective altruist -- or even to be an ordinary person in the world we live in. But it sounds like "we" (we the optimizers and engineers of the future) don't value strength in itself. We can take it for granted because we have so much of it. But if it were all gone, we would be pulled by the undertow of hedonism toward emptiness and death. That we are not terrified by hedonism, thinking it's not a threat, may simply be because we feel like we would never in a million years succumb to pleasure if it threatened survival. Maybe we wouldn't, but that is because we are strong. If we don't maintain our strength, we will die.

(Pain isn't evil, even intense pain. What is evil is the unbearability of unbearable pain. A negative utilitarian (of the conventional sort) wants to eliminate pain. But there could be another negative utilitarian, a negative unbearability utilitarian, who could eliminate pain, or increase the strength of people so that they can bear pain. What if you were a strength utilitarian? Unbearable pain impedes strength. But increasing strength can make pain bearable. A strength utilitarian would want to maximize the strength of people. And, likely enough, the capacity of people to secure their own strength ("meta-strength"). Eliminating pain could take away some of the motivation to develop meta-strength.)

If people were strong, they could think clearly enough to lead themselves.

(Perhaps moderate pain, and/or the live possibility of pain, gives us a clarity of thinking and willing that painless pleasure (especially bliss), the lack of the threat of pain, and sufficiently unbearable pain do not. Someone who lived in the "place" of "gradients of bliss" might out of boundless joy make decisions that further survival. However, to the extent that pleasure is qualia of "ought-to-be-ness", that sense of "ought-to-be" could produce acceptance of everything. Thinking to times when I have been "blissed out", I did not pursue things that harmed me, and I could see myself having eaten food or something like that. But I lacked maximal strength, and motivation to work, which might be necessary to survive in the long run.)

(It is possible that we will come to think of it as being immoral, or something like immoral, to experience pain and/or not experience maximal pleasure. If we develop our values "democratically", the "lowest common denominator", or easiest consensus, could be physical safety and hedonism, but physical safety could be, or come to be, valued for purely hedonistic reasons, as a way to avoid pain. If we are far from the threat of death, hedonism will still be something obvious to us to vote for, and that voting could create political momentum to set up pure hedonism as a "moral absolute". So then the purity of hedonism could conflict with the prolonging of it, if in order to prolong hedonism, we need to have some respite from "ought-to-be-ness" within the ruling class. But if the masses still have enough power (they are relatively speaking not the ruling class, but have power over the ruling class -- maybe they have power, but don't concern themselves with the work and details of rule), they could shut down even the ruling class, or bend them toward hedonistic purity. This purity could lead to everyone either directly choosing, or allowing, a "beautiful, painless, wonderful death".)

The ruling class of the future must be strong, in order to face dangers and put its own pleasure and avoidance of pain second to making the decisions that will lead to our survival. But if strength is good for them, why would it not be good for the "common people" of the future? A naive thought about the future is that there will be lots of happy, carefree people enjoying the fruits of technologically-driven abundance, and a relative few who perhaps are happy overall, but who have taken on the burden of ruling and are thus perhaps not as happy and are certainly not carefree. But there's some shear there. Are the values of the carefree masses good in themselves? Then the ruling classes must see them as good, right? But if they do, then won't the ruling classes feel their work as an obligation, rather than what they most want to do? If so, then they have a wearing temptation to quit and join the carefree masses. But then, if they do see strength as valuable, then to withhold strength from the masses creates cognitive tension as well. Or, perhaps we are used to withholding the really good values from the masses for the convenience of running a society? But morally, we should want the masses to have the best values. So why not extend strength to all, and make strength the chief (secular) value? Why not involve all people in the process of safeguarding the future? Strength secures the very possibilities of hedonism (or avoiding unbearability) and survival.

A possibly cartoonish depiction of us (at least, the people I observe both among the "ordinary humans" and the "caring elites") is that we are sweet-natured but overworked people. So we just want everyone to be happy and not have to worry or care about anything.

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Is it possible that we can freeze cultural evolution? Wouldn't someone know that we had frozen it, and wouldn't they know what had happened and how to unfreeze it? (Maybe they could alter people's genes, to flip on some capabilities that had been shut down with the freezing.) Could everyone resist the temptation, over millions of years, to unfreeze it? I suppose it's possible for culture to remain stable and (maybe) not frozen. By "frozen" I mean "artificially stuck a certain way". The contrast with "artificial" ("natural") being "everyone wants and chooses things to be a certain way, and so if they could all choose to freeze society to be a certain way, it would be around the values they already have, so they wouldn't freeze it, freezing being unnecessary". Could there be a stability to people's values? Maybe there could be if people knew all the possible values and settled on the ones which they knew would work best through all time?

Favoring being strong sounds like it would encourage people to be willful, independent thinkers who couldn't agree on anything. But maybe if we really understood what was upstream of willfulness and independence of thought, we would see that there is a huge support structure that goes into allowing for maximal willfulness and independence of thought, and this support structure is easy for strength-maximizers to agree on.

If we are strong, we can resist hedonism once survival has been secured.

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How do holiness maximization and strength maximization relate? Strength maximization is weaker than holiness maximization. Why be strong? Just to be strong? Strength maximization may be thinner (depends on how much thickness comes from the support structure needed for maximization of strength), and is not inherently grounded in the answer to the question "what is ultimately of value?" (On the MSLN account, holiness is grounded in what we can reasonably infer the standard of value prefers, given that it must be conscious, empathetic, put itself highest, etc.; and, those root facts about the standard of value lend credence to likely cases where the standard of value has revealed itself and its preferences more specifically. Holiness is inherently about being in tune with the standard of value -- perhaps that is what it is by definition. But strength as something we value is not inherently about being in tune with the standard of value. This is especially true if we are pursuing it as a way to survive, and can't ground survival itself in what is ultimately of value, either.) But strength maximization might be a convenient proxy value for holiness to the extent that we must be secular and liberal. It appears, given this post so far, to be an improvement over hedonism as a "non-religious or non-ideological common value that we can agree on as a society".

Hedonism is both a drive or force and a value (or taste). The drive (the psychological undertow of pleasure and pain) is something that could kill us if we let it. But if we simply value hedonic states, and are instrumentally rational, we will be motivated to be strong enough to not let that happen. So maybe hedonists can hold onto their hedonism, and simply incorporate strength as an instrumental value in their pursuit of what really matters to them, absence of pain and presence of pleasure over the long-term.

Hedonism as drive is an obvious danger for anyone concerned with survival (at least, if this post is correct). But hedonism as value might seem to not be. But, hedonism as value and holiness are at odds (unless one is valued instrumentally in furthering the other), and hedonism as value might be deadly, as well, if religious, or certain religious, views are correct. So then it becomes necessary to consider whether those views are effectively correct enough to make hedonism as value untrustworthy.

In terms of protecting delicacy, perhaps holiness maximization is the best because it is the thickest and most conservative. Strength and hedonism both lend themselves to flexibility, and thus simplification, thus throwing away what is valuable.

Seductively Mild Depression / Disengagement

Sometimes I experience a kind of mental disengagement. This correlates with my bipolar depression. My depression takes different forms, sometimes a proneness to irritability, sometimes a slowed-down mind, sometimes an increased openness to despair or giving up, sometimes fatigue.

All of these either now or in the past have taken on blatant, extreme forms. For instance, in an extreme mental disengagement spell, I can't focus the best, can't work on things. My eyes might go somewhat blank, and I might find it difficult to pursue lines of thought or to recall words.

If my disengaging depression is mild enough, I don't sense it as being something that should not be. A strong depression is obviously a problem, something to fight and not something to trust or build your life around. Instead, you want to separate yourself from it and what it tells you, and get back to normal. Fortunately, having bipolar disorder means my depression spells go away more or less on their own. I think it would be harder for someone with clinical depression that had no mood cycling. But for me, I can write off strong depression as "not me" and then wait it out so I can be in the mood that reflects my real values, something euthymic, or less depressed, or whatever.

But a mild depression can trick me sometimes, and make me feel like I'm experiencing normal -- a new normal. As I grow, I experience different flavors of depression, some of them for the first time. I am uncorking the mellow wines of older age, perhaps? Maybe I like these mild depressions? There's something seductive about a sufficiently mild depression.

(In a disengaged depression, I may feel like nothing matters, because I can't engage with reality. But it isn't really true that nothing matters, it's just my mood. Or I may feel like I'm not interested in working to engage with reality. I can choose whether to identify with the disengagement or lack of desire to work, or to reject them. But in the moment, it's telling me that I'm a certain way, and external reality is a certain way, and what it tells me covers my mind.)

Feeling bad doesn't bother me -- at least, it doesn't seem like a real threat to my ability to do what matters. But being slowed-down -- mellowed out -- with a relatively positive hedonic "flavor" is pretty dangerous, exactly because it doesn't feel dangerous. The danger is that I get caught in a habit of being disengaged. My mind can't do heavy lifting, or see things sharply and clearly in these mild depressions. So, I am less able to do what I need to do or even to witness the truth. I can go with the flow of my culture, but I have lost my purpose. I am indexed to the flow around me, and I no longer am indexed to God. I am no longer myself, I cease to exist on some level, and that's actually not a good thing.

My different moods are like being plunged underwater (or hypomania is like some kind of opposite equivalent, like being stuck in the sea of air, flying 10,000 feet above the ground). So I don't expect to be able to do too much to control them, since they are what they are and have their power. But I still fight them, and maybe if I didn't, I would stay in them longer. And maybe milder moods are more within my power to fight effectively. At the very least, even if moods like this are persistent until they "decide" to leave, I can learn to identify when I am drifting, when I am disengaged or unable to engage, and see this psychological state as being other than me, instead of attaching to it, as I sometimes automatically do. Hopefully then I can get out of that state as soon as possible.

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How does rest play into this? Disengagement and rest may necessarily correlate.

Most people go on vacation without worrying about whether they will choose to go back to work at the end of it. But imagine if when you went on vacation (maybe to a beach resort in another country), you were concerned that you might not be able to tear yourself away from it to get on the plane to go home. If you stayed there, you would lose your job. Maybe in that case, vacation would sound like a bad idea.

Maybe with my life, some rest is relatively safe, and some of it is dangerous. If rest is something that will reliably lead back to work, then that's relatively safe. But rest that takes on a life of its own, and cuts me off from doing what I need to do, is dangerous.

Praying to Begin to Care for the Non-Default

Sometimes I pray for God to help me keep caring about what is non-default (distant people, future people, people's spiritual state -- like whether they fully make it to him, caring about him himself). To care about what is default is what you do when you don't care about anything, in a state of deadenedness or exhaution. But to care about the non-default requires that you have "fight" in you, to push against the default mindset. That fight tends to be or always is intentional and conscious, a moment of decision.

This tends to prove successful for me, as though caring about the non-default is something that God wants me to do and will help me with.

It's been some time since I first encountered the question of the well-being of the non-default. In some cases, I remember the mechanism of the "inciting message" being all it took to open me up to those concerns. In other cases, I can't clearly remember how I came to adopt those values -- maybe I'm only gradually adopting some of them, but I have already begun.

I can guess that maybe someone who was approaching a potential initial valuing of the non-default could pray to God to help them to value it, in parallel to how I pray to continue to value.

Suicide

How does MSLN deal with suicide?

I don't like writing about this subject, because I feel like I'm checking off the boxes of "things that an ethicist is supposed to deal with" or "things that an ethicist is supposed to make a ruling on as though they know anything". In a way, I would rather state the truth and not my rulings, and let my readers come up with their own rulings for themselves, based on their own understanding of the truth.

However, I have some experience with this topic, and perhaps can write to people who are contemplating suicide, or who might again contemplate suicide.

I don't believe that this life matters as much as atheists or some Christians do. This follows from MSLN. I think that our culture (and biology) scam us into thinking it is "the" thing. People make this life into a god, and they worship it by trying to control people so that they also worship that god. Death (at least, the first death) is more like "falling asleep". (The second death, the result of hardening, really is the end, and is something serious.)

Life is a time to be useful, whether through what we do or who or what we are.

I've never made plans to kill myself, but I've had my mind captured so that that action seemed like the default thing to do.

When I've been closer to suicide, I've done different things. I didn't really want to die, because I had things to do still. I also knew that as someone who was against the "life-god", I paradoxically had a greater duty to not kill myself, because people under its rule would automatically discount what I had to say against it, if they found out I had killed myself. I tried a number of different things to avoid killing myself, such as going to therapists (but the therapists were aggressive or manipulative, and not on my side, so I quit going), taking psychiatric medication for my bipolar disorder (a pre-existing, relatively contained condition made worse by the thing that was making me suicidal), exercising, talking to friends, and maybe other things that secular people pursue, to stave off "falling asleep".

I also prayed, and I wish that that always worked, so that I didn't have to do the secular things. That would say that God, and relating to God, were what saved a person, instead of a bundle of coping mechanisms which could contain God, or not, whatever works for you. The "life-god" cruelly smothers the part of people that wants to love God more than life.

Praying did help sometimes, and gave me the gift of having heard from God, on some occasions.

I think that being suicidal (and experiencing other unbearability to a lesser intensity, over a longer period of time) has given me a sense of confidence, through a confrontation with life and death. I am not sure if I learned all the lessons that I can from that time, but one that I might learn is to understand the full nature of love, which loves when times are good and when they are bad. Love is not full-grown except if it has exercised its ability to deal with the desert, when it goes unrewarded for years. It is also not full-grown if it does not pay a cost. Full-grown love has paid a cost that goes beyond what it is willing to pay. So I hope that by resisting death, I was learning to love something.

My temptation is to say that I was learning to love life, but then the life-god wins and I am pinned down on one side, no longer free to go to God. Is it possible to really love God, when life pursues you? I didn't feel like I was learning to love life by resisting death, and maybe I wasn't, and was only learning to love. And if I can be whole-souled, I love God and those whom God loves, and not the clothes we happen to wear.

The love that comes in the desert and is asked too much of does not feel like love. But it is love. Sometimes, what feels like love, is love, a different kind. But sometimes it only feels like love, and is something fake.

Giving Life vs. Untying Knots

My straw man conception of therapy is that it is all about untying knots. The therapist (or friend) can talk you through your problems and help you untie your own knots, so that your rope is free of knots. Then you will be at peace and accept things, and function smoothly.

But where do you get life from? What if someone gave you life, and you could tolerate having knots? Maybe life is better than unknottedness. But the therapist (or friend) may not be able to give you life, particularly if their orientation is toward problem-solving, or their goal is unknottedness and not life.

Jesus claims to give us life. How do we connect with Jesus? Perhaps by obeying his commands. We can "ask, seek, and knock", seeing God as someone who wants to give us good things, and that can give life. In times of desperation we learn to pray, desperate enough to listen to Jesus and believe that we have already received what we asked for. We can pursue and undergo the cross, and having been willing to cease to exist (and perhaps undergoing something like death), we come out alive. Perhaps in some other way, Jesus offers life.

'Ought' Implies 'Can' But How Capable Are We?

I've heard the saying "'ought' implies 'can'". I take that to mean "If you say that I ought to do something, I have to be able to do it." This saying makes a lot of sense, but it can be a deceptive truth, because if we are unaware of the saying, if we instead think "'ought' is when reality demands something of me", then we may well find that we "can" do much more than we otherwise would have thought we could. If we focus a lot on how "'ought' implies 'can'", if we just don't want to do what reality demands of us, we fail to develop the capabilities and thus say "Well, I can't, so I'm not obligated to do anything."

Is ought something we ask of people, and so it would be unfair to ask too much of them? Or is the failure to do what we ought something we impose on reality, and it is unfair to reality to not do what is really called for? The answer to both questions is yes. I guess the way to practically sort this out (one way, at least) is to approach life as though you always have a duty to external reality, and you find out the limits of your "can" by pushing yourself further in your pursuit of fulfilling that duty. You learn that you "can't" by trying as hard as you can and being unable -- and to really know that limit, you have to keep trying even after you think you're unable, until you are unable to try.

If you don't want to do what reality calls for, you will find that you "can't" much sooner than if you do. If you do, you will be more correct whenever you reach the point of judging yourself as "can't".

How Does God Cope?; Looking to People

God has the hardest job in the world. How does he cope? One clue might be found in Job 1:

6 Now on the day when God's sons came to present themselves before Yahweh, Satan also came among them. 7 Yahweh said to Satan, "Where have you come from?"

Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, "From going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."

8 Yahweh said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil."

God notices when we are "blameless, upright, fear him, and turn from evil". That much is stated in the text. How would God feel about such people? He might find them refreshing, encouraging, or pleasing. So while God, as the most-real, is unable to avoid being conscious of all that is bad in the world, he cannot neglect being conscious of all that is good in the world. "The world" fundamentally consists of all the personal beings who make it up. So God is conscious of the good people who do exist.

We can be like God, seeking the truth. If we have a hard time coping in life, a truth-oriented approach would be, like God, to seek people to think about who refresh us, encourage us, please us (in the way that they are pleasing to God).

Matthew 14:

22 Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead of him to the other side, while he sent the multitudes away. 23 After he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into the mountain by himself to pray. When evening had come, he was there alone. 24 But the boat was now in the middle of the sea, distressed by the waves, for the wind was contrary. 25 In the fourth watch of the night, Jesus came to them, walking on the sea. 26 When the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It's a ghost!" and they cried out for fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, "Cheer up! It is I! Don't be afraid."

28 Peter answered him and said, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the waters."

29 He said, "Come!"

Peter stepped down from the boat and walked on the waters to come to Jesus. 30 But when he saw that the wind was strong, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, "Lord, save me!"

31 Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand, took hold of him, and said to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

Being very honest, and not with any intended disrespect, we can sometimes see that some people, when we look on them, are like the strong wind, which cause us to be afraid, and sink. Whereas other people, when we look on them, are like looking at Jesus, or hearing his voice. What is the truth? Jesus declares that he is the truth. Jesus is not always as vivid to us as people we know, so we sometimes need to look at them in order to see the truth backed up by his reality. People connect us to Jesus by being like Jesus, or through their faith in Jesus.

In order to be real, like Jesus, we have to see bad that is in the world as well as good. But some good that we see enables us to see the overall truth. The bad that we see can take that away from us, pathologically.

It occurs to me to add that out of regard for Jesus, it may be good to look to him even when life is easier.

Defend Against Feelings

Some people are stronger than others in who they are. Those people should mourn, on purpose, because they will not be ruled over by their mourning. They will remain themselves even in the presence of negative feelings.

But other people are not as strong in who they are, and feelings can overwhelm them. It might be best for such people to become stronger in who they are, so that they can mourn, can see the honor in the loss of something, can faithfully register that some good is gone, or foregone.

You can feel sad in such a way that it is the sadness that is happening, and you are not really the one being sad. But in that case the sadness rules you and punishes you. So then you try not to open yourself to mourning, for fear of letting the sadness in. In the long run, you might seek some way to become a stronger person, become more personal. In a sense, to become more strong-willed, without even your own will ruling over you. But in the short term, it may be best to defend against sad feelings. Or any other feelings that possess and usurp.

Approach With Courage, Believe in the Existence of Yourself

Who are you, really? What are you responsible for, in any situation? Some people are unable to voluntarily move, except for their eyelids, by which they can communicate -- or some, not even that. What are they responsible for? Who are they? The connection there is "who you are is what you choose". Maybe that's an overly simplistic view of human nature, but I think it at least captures something important, and I tend to want to favor it.

We face limitations due to aging -- we may all face that, either now, or, if we survive, in our future. There are other limitations besides that, which occur with less universality. Are we defined by our limitations? It depends on what we mean by "we". I would say that the paralyzed person is not defined by their paralysis. If they were put in a different body somehow, they would physically act out their personality. The body is accidental, not essential. I can't hold a paralyzed person responsible for not moving -- maybe partially so if they knowingly chose to paralyze themself (a rare occurrence), but even then, they would no longer be able to change their minds after the fact, and would have to live with the decision of their past self, who increasingly would be becoming to them a separate person. Likewise, I can't hold myself 100% responsible for the body or life that I'm stuck with. To an extent, it's not me. Essentially, it's something stuck to me, and to a large extent, other things than my choices are responsible for it.

However, it is more true that the way that I approach life emotionally, with my inner eye, and with my inner will, and the way I choose to think, does express who I am. If I were completely paralyzed, but still myself and still conscious, how I thought about life, and paralysis, would be me, would be an exercise and expression of me being myself. The state of my heart in the present moment is a root responsibility that I am always capable of disposing of properly.

So in this space of minimal limitation, in the world of what I choose to think and how I choose to see, I can express and exercise my heart (the true preferences and intentions within me) by having courage. To approach whatever there is, and whatever limits me, without flippancy, arrogance, impatience, or despair, but rather with courage.

--

Forces like depression and anxiety can seem to be me, and I can feel, in despair, that they are more powerful than me, that I must bow to them. In a sense, perhaps I must. If I must bow to them, how can there be a God? My mind can shut down to the spiritual and intellectual world if I identify so totally with my limitations. I can live in a narrow world, made up of practical concerns and the desire for the luck or therapy for me to not be beset by my psychological problems. If I am so limited, in a world where the only relevant thing is my narrow well-being, and God is not admitted as a person who can address that narrow well-being, of course for me God does not exist. I might say that he exists, or halfway believe it, but on the level of trusting, I do not believe that he exists.

In some way, the sense that I am not myself in the face of mental forces connects with my inability to say "God exists". Perhaps because in order for me to believe in the existence of God, I need to believe in the existence of myself. Myself, a free-willed being, who sees things according to his own lights, and thus is able to see the intellectual and spiritual world, things which are true in themselves, apart from what is forced on me, things which I must find unbearable or attractive in the pragmatic, personal, social, psychological world.

In a natural theology like simantism, it is important that I exist, a person, and that I can relate to what is not-me. From this, there is relationality, and I am not alone. From this, and for other reasons, if I am a person, then the universe can be personal. There is a give-and-take between me and what is not-me that suggests that what is not-me is a person. There is an analogy between myself, who is conscious, and what is not-me, which then might ought to be seen as conscious. If I, a consciousness, choose and cause, then what I experience might ought to also be chosen and caused by a conscious person. For these reasons, I might think that I live in relationality to all that is, and that all that is is a person. But if I am not a person, then maybe it is not.

If I exist, on some level, I am awake, in a way that I am not when I somehow think that I don't exist.

Perhaps too, if I slip below the waves into non-existence, I can no longer relate to God, can no longer really be a moral person or an obedient person, for not being able to be myself, choosing. I can still go through the motions of life -- who wouldn't? I can flow away from unbearability and toward what is attractive, automatically and inevitably. But on a deeper level, I can't relate to God, and on a deeper level, what we can't or don't relate to, doesn't exist to us.

But as long as I can recognize facts, I recognize the fact that I exist.

--

You have real limitations, but if you can remember, you always exist. And then there is always some level on which you can be courageous, given whatever limitations you have.

Bearing and Valuing

Listening to the hold music -- the same loop, 30 seconds to a minute long. The first time it sound a little nice. Soon it becomes irritating. But you have to bear it in order to get the prize -- a representative. You have to listen -- at any moment the representative could pick up the phone and you need to be ready. You have incentive to bear the hold music.

Do you think the hold music is good? It is pleasant but in its repetition you find its flaws. It was never the greatest music to begin with. You judge it to be mediocre. But as it plays, you judge it to be worse than mediocre, offensive in its repetition. You need to relate to the hold music as it is -- repetitive. You are encouraged to change your value of the hold music. You don't have to. But if you judge it to be good, if you fall in love with it (as in this illustration), you can bear it better.

So the fact that we are forced to experience something biases us toward calling it good. To experience is to bear. We can fight, keep the dissonance arising when we bear the unbearable. Or we can accept, and find the unbearable bearable.

Agency and AI

There are probably other ways to come to define agency, but I come at this from the angle of thinking about artificial intelligence.

One version of our (perhaps not-so-distant) AI-affected future is that one AI will completely take over, rule the whole world. (The other version is that there will be multiple AI (and perhaps humans) which collectively, perhaps as something scene-like analogous to the international system of national governments, rule or prefer not to rule the whole world.)

If one AI takes over the whole world, we would hope that it was programmed in such a way that it was aligned with human well-being. But there's at least two problems. One is, the technical challenge of getting an AI to actually be aligned any particular way. It isn't always easy to code concepts, even ones which you can more or less live according to, yourself, as a human. The other is that people don't really know what human well-being is. I can think of a few different approaches to well-being: humans should feel pleasure, should not feel pain, should feel "ought-to-be-ness" (a concept to be discussed in my upcoming review of The Feeling of Value), should have their preferences satisfied, should have their trust maximized, should be "good people" (according to Christianity? What kind of Christianity? Or a kind of Islam? Or another religion? Or a branch of secular thinking?), should relate properly to reality (what does that mean?), should relate properly to God (which one?).

Given this profusion of options, one might conclude that it is unlikely that this is even the complete list, and also that if you wanted to code all these, it would be difficult, and you would tend to have to make a lot of decisions about how to balance goals that seemed to contradict in particular cases. And, at best, one strain of humanity would actually like what you were coming up with. As you designed your AI, you would be writing the constitution of the future world's culture and government, but it's likely that many or most people wouldn't approve of the decisions you were making.

So you might think that the wise and humble thing to do would be to try to make an AI that ceded as much decision-making ability to humans as possible. That way, over the coming centuries, humans could all participate in a process that humans have been participating in for hundreds of years, of proposing one or another version of human well-being and living by it, hoping to win over their neighbors. Perhaps someday we would have settled on one version of human well-being, and AI could maximize that. (Or maybe even then it should hang back, and we should hang back a little ourselves, because human consensus does not prove alignment with ultimate reality.) But until then, the AI would simply facilitate that process by which we make decisions.

So the AI might try to maximize agency. Agency, in this particular formulation, being "the ability to secure one's own decision-making ability and minimal physical liberty". The AI would try to keep people from dying, and help build them up to be capable of seeing things from their own point of view, so that they could make their own decisions if they chose to, and then at least minimally act on them, by not being impeded from moving their bodies. The AI would take into account the ways in which people's actions impair each other's decision-making abilities (psychological coercion, causing trauma, causing pain above a certain threshold, etc.), and do its best to create a society with fewer such impairments.

So there could be such a thing as "agency utilitarianism", whereby we try to build up the greatest number of people in the greatest way, to be able to function and make their own decisions, and sometimes to defend themselves, if they want to.

We already have world-ruling AI (of a sort), which are states. We also have elite cultures, such as those capable of designing powerful technologies or policies, or those capable of significantly influencing those designers. People in a position of power or "eliteness" are in a position where they can make decisions on behalf of other people. The greater the power, and the greater the differential between elites and non-elites, the more that elites or states resemble world-ruling AI. States and elites, like AI, also have the problem of not really knowing what human well-being is, and of not necessarily being aligned with it, whatever they take it to be. (The people who design AI are themselves part of the elite.)

It's hard to "code" a particular definition of well-being in systems made up of human beings, just as it is in AI. How would we actually get a state, an elite culture, or a culture at large (all of which rule over individual citizens) to adhere to one, correct, fully-featured definition of well-being? If we try to coordinate them all on one idea, the simpler the better. So perhaps the idea to implement should be for each citizen to be able to pursue a true definition of well-being, and to be able to pursue that and offer to share it with others, in ways that do not impede others' pursuit of the same. And thus, agency as the value for rulers to maximize, while citizens may seek anything more intense and true.

Trading Unkindnesses

What is true, apart from popularity, can be unkind to you. But in some ways, it can be kinder than popularity.

Video Poem: On a long journey to the truth

This video might make it sound like happiness is a bad thing. Like you're supposed to push yourself, never let up -- that itself is the truth.

I don't think that happiness is opposed to the truth. But happiness is a byproduct of a life that's aimed at the truth, a byproduct that helps you do what you need to do. Pleasure is a kind of psychic fuel. It can be hard to do without it. And pain often accompanies damage, and damage will hold you back.

But if you make happiness your goal, you will more than likely stop short of the truth. Why would you think you would find a thing if you stopped looking once you set your eyes on another thing? It might happen coincidentally, but wouldn't be more likely than that. Making happiness your goal might not even make you happy, and stopping at that goal rather than trying for something else might leave you both miserable and disconnected from the truth.

Stamina

One of the things they don't tell you is that while appearances do matter (affecting how you relate to yourself, how others relate to you), what also matters is strength, stamina, strength of mind as well as body. If you are a beautiful person, do you have the strength to deliver on your beauty? Or will your stamina give out? -- you'll snap at someone you were gentle toward.

So virtue involves the building-up of wealth, while somehow not compromising a spirit of poverty. This presents a puzzle for which there is at least one answer I can think of -- how can these two aims be reconciled?