Magical thinking

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Magical thinking is hallucinating a causal connection where there is none.¹ It includes ideas such as destiny, “messages from God” (or “from the universe”), belief in physical effects of “magical” acts, psychic powers, and so forth.

Magical thinking is a common form of patternicity. It is a common ploy for making eternalism seem workable when it is not.

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed meaning. Magical thinking gives specific, wrong meanings to many meaningless events; and eternalism can be used as a theoretical framework for justifying the meanings given by magical thinking. (“It’s not just a naturally-occurring omen, it’s a message from God!”) So there is a powerful synergy between eternalism and magical thinking. In fact, most major religions probably began as systematic appropriations of everyday magical thinking by elite eternalist priesthoods.

However, magical thinking is not necessarily eternalist. For example, believing homeopathy works, without giving it any spiritual significance, is magical thinking—but not eternalism. On the other hand, if you think homeopathy has something to do with cosmic Oneness, that is eternalistic.

Magical thinking causes harm when you act on mistaken causal beliefs and get bad results.

Part of the antidote to magical thinking is understanding that brains just naturally do it. You have to watch out for it. Once you see its patterns, catching it becomes automatic, and you can laugh at it.

Another part of the antidote is to learn how the world actually works.

Comment on this page

1.More precisely, magical thinking is belief in a causal connection without having an adequate epistemological basis. There are interesting borderline cases, such as nutritional “science”—which I write about later—for which the epistemological basis is contested. I am more skeptical of nutritional “science” than most people; and I also believe that it is heavily laden with covert moral claims, thereby attributing ethical meanings to food that it does not have. All this makes nutrition a fascinating contemporary example of eternalism, magical thinking, and the metastasis of ethics into domains where it has no legitimate business.

Book contents

Table of contents
Why meaningness?
Informally introducing the central themes of the Meaningness book.
- An appetizer: purpose
  Five confused attitudes to life purpose, as an introduction to meaningness.
- Preview: eternalism and nihilism
  Two stances that don't work: “Everything has a definite meaning” and “Nothing means anything.”
- What is meaningness?
  Meaningness is the quality of being meaningful or meaningless.
- Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable
  Mistaken attitudes toward meaning create unnecessary psychological/spiritual/existential suffering.
Stances: responses to meaningness
The overall conceptual framework: “stances” are simple patterns of thinking and feeling about meaningness.
- Stances trump systems
  People think they approach meaning in terms of religions or philosophies, but in practice, "stances" matter more.
- Stances are unstable
  Stances—responses to meaning—are unstable thought-patterns. Often we adopt several contradictory ones in rapid succession.
- Nebulosity
  Meaningness is cloud-like: nebulous. It is real, but impossible to completely pin down.
- Pattern
  Brains automatically find meaning and pattern; we need them to act. Unfortunately, brains also find meaning and pattern where there are none.
- Fixation and denial
  Fixation and denial are the two simplest ways of refusing to deal with the nebulosity of meaningness.
- Confused stances come in pairs
  Wrong ideas about meaning come in mirror-image pairs, which fixate and deny opposite aspects of reality.
- No middle way
  Polarized pairs of confused stances cannot be resolved by compromise. There is no middle way between them.
- Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning
  Confusions about meaning can be resolved using a method for looking at ways nebulosity affects the subject matter.
  - Not a general dialectic
    The method for resolving confusion about meaning through accepting nebulosity is not a general dialectic, or logic for resolving all false oppositions.
- Confusion, completion, misery and joy
  Properly understanding meaning eliminates needless suffering. An application: ethics.
- Meaningness as a liberating practice
  A practice of replacing confused, dysfunctional patterns of thinking and feeling about meaning with accurate ones.
- The psychological anatomy of a stance
  The key aspects of a stance toward meaning, and how to use them effectively.
- Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating
  Concerning relationships one may have with stances: basic attitudes toward meaningness.
- The Big Three stance combinations
  Dualism, nihilism, and monism are the three main approaches to fundamental questions of meaning. This book proposes a better, fourth alternative.
- Schematic overview: all dimensions
  A complete summary overview of all the dimensions of meaningness, with all the common stances one can take to them.
Meaning and meaninglessness
Eternalism fixates meaning; nihilism denies it. Recognizing that meaning is both nebulous and patterned resolves this false dichotomy.
- The puzzle of meaningness
  What is the meaning of an extra-marital affair—or any relationship? A philosophical short story illustrates the puzzle of the nebulosity of meaningness.
- Meaningfulness and meaninglessness
  Some things are meaningful, and others aren't. This is obvious; yet most confusions about meaning begin by denying it.
- Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism
  Claims that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is, are motivated by fears: fear of the opposite.
- ⚒︎ No cosmic plan
  Great confusions about meaningness stem from the mistaken assumption that there must be some sort of eternal ordering principle.
- So how does meaningness work?
  We have a choice of explanations: ones that are simple, clear, harmful, and wrong; or ones that are complex, vague, helpful, and approximately right.
- Rumcake and rainbows
  Meaning cannot be either objective or subjective. But meaning does exist: as interaction.
- Schematic overview: meaningness
  A schematic overview of eternalism and nihilism as confused responses to meaningness.
- Eternalism: the fixation of meaning
  Eternalism is the wrong idea that everything has a definite meaning, fixed by an external ordering principle.
  - I get duped by eternalism in a casino
    Gambling, religion, and addiction: a personal story.
  - The appeal of eternalism
    Eternalism promises everything you could want from meaning: safety, support, certainty, reassurance, and control. Solid ground!
    - The promise of certainty
      What we want most from meaning is guarantees. Religions, political ideologies, and other eternalist systems promise certainty; but they cannot deliver.
    - The illusion of understanding
      It’s deluded to think we mostly understand issues of meaning (ethics, purpose, value, politics). Ideologies deliberately create and sustain that illusion.
    - The fantasy of control
      Eternalism promises complete control over life—but that is an impossible fantasy. Influence through collaboration and improvisation are possible, however.
    - The wheel of fortune
      Eternalism promises answers about good and bad—the meanings we care about most—but cannot deliver.
    - Eternalism as the only salvation from nihilism
      Eternalism's final promise is to keep nihilism at bay. There is a better alternative to both!
  - Eternalism is harmful
    Eternalism—belief in fixed meanings—makes promises it can't keep. It makes us do stupid, crazy, evil things. And we still love it and keep going back for more.
  - Eternalist systems
    Systems such as religions and political ideologies reinforce eternalism. They dispel doubt by denying nebulosity.
  - Vaster than ideology
    When you discover you are owned by an ideology, you can escape. Better, you can become a larger space.
  - Accomplishing eternalism
    Accomplishing eternalism would would mean knowing the meaning of everything, and acting accordingly. This is impossible, because there are no fixed meanings.
  - Exiting eternalism
    Learning skills for escaping the grip of eternalism—the delusion that everything is meaningful.
  - Eternalist ploys and their antidotes
    Ploys—ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting—which stabilize eternalism; and antidotes to use against them.
    - ⚒︎ Imposing fixed meanings
      Forcing fixed meanings on experience always eventually results in unpleasant shocks when reality refuses to conform to your pre-determined categories.
    - ⚒︎ Smearing meaning all over everything
      Monist eternalism—the New Age and SBNR, for example—say everything is meaningful, but leaves vague what the meanings are.
    - ⚒︎ Magical thinking
      Magical thinking—hallucinating causal connections—is powerfully synergistic with eternalism (the stance that everything has a fixed meaning).
    - ⚒︎ Hope
      Hope is harmful in devaluing the present and shifting attention to imaginary futures that may never exist.
    - ⚒︎ Pretending
      Eternalist religions and political systems are always partly make-believe, like children playing at being pirates.
    - ⚒︎ Colluding for eternalism
      Because eternalist delusion is so desirable, we collude to maintain it. To save each other from nihilism, we support each other in not-seeing nebulosity.
    - ⚒︎ Hiding from nebulosity
      Hiding from nebulosity is a ploy to preserve eternalism by physically avoiding ambiguous situations and information.
    - ⚒︎ Kitsch and naïveté
      Eternalist kitsch is the denial of the possibility of meaninglessness. This leads to willfully idiotic sentimentality.
    - ⚒︎ Armed & armored eternalism
      When nebulosity becomes obvious, eternalism fails to fit reality. You can armor yourself against evidence, and arm yourself to destroy it.
    - ⚒︎ Faith
      Privileging faith over experience is an eternalist ploy for blinding yourself to signs of nebulosity.
    - ⚒︎ Thought suppression
      Thought suppression is a ploy for maintaining faith in non-existent meanings. It leads to deliberate stupidity, inability to express oneself, and inaction.
    - ⚒︎ Bargaining and recommitment
      When eternalism lets you down, you are tempted to make a bargain with it. Eternalism will behave itself better, and in return you renew your faith in it.
    - ⚒︎ Wistful certainty
      Wistful certainty is a ploy for reinforcing eternalism based on the thought that there must exist whatever it takes to make eternalism seem to work.
    - ⚒︎ Faithful bafflement
      Faithful bafflement is a ploy for maintaining the eternalist stance that remains committed but begins to doubt.
    - ⚒︎ Mystification
      Mystification uses thoughts as a weapon against authentic thinking. It creates glib, bogus metaphysical explanations that sweep meaninglessness under the rug.
    - ⚒︎ Rehearsing the horrors of nihilism
      Reminding yourself and others of how bad nihilism is can help maintain the eternalist stance. This is the hellfire and brimstone of eternalist preaching.
    - ⚒︎ Purification
      Purity is an obsessive focus for dualist eternalism. It mobilizes emotions of disgust, guilt, shame, and self-righteous anger.
    - ⚒︎ Fortress eternalism
      In the face of undeserved suffering, is difficult not to fall into the stance that most things are God’s will, but not the horrible bits.
- Nihilism: denying meaning
  Nihilism is the wrong idea that nothing is meaningful, based on the accurate realization that there is no external, eternal source of meaning.
  - You’ve got nihilism wrong
    Whether you think you are a nihilist, or think you are not—I think you are mistaken. Nihilism is impossible—but so is avoiding it.
  - Cold comfort: the promise of nihilism
    Nihilism promises you don’t have to care, because nothing means anything. But you do care—and you can’t escape that.
  - The emotional dynamics of nihilism
    Nihilism relies on three emotional strategies to deny meaning: rage, intellectualization, and depression. It also causes anxiety.
  - What is it like to be a nihilist?
    The end-state of nihilism is not suicide, but catatonia.
  - Nihilism is black magic
    Nihilism has a taboo allure of forbidden power—because everyone knows eternalism is wrong.
  - Sexy cynicism and nihilist elitism
    Recognizing meaninglessness requires unusual intelligence, courage, and toughness. Nihilist elitism renders you stupid, cowardly, and helpless, though.
  - The nihilist apocalypse
    A world of total license: the catastrophe some fear if nihilistic views become widespread.
  - “Nihilism is OK” is not OK
    “Nihilism is inevitable, but not a problem.” This is mistaken: it makes you miserable and ineffective, and erodes social and cultural capacity.
  - ⚒︎ Nihilistic rage and clarity
    Nihilistic rage wants to destroy whatever has meaning, and whoever points to meaning.
  - ⚒︎ Nihilistic intellectualization and understanding
    When desperate to deny all meanings, we use absurd pseudo-rational, pseudo-scientific, intellectual arguments to justify nihilism.
    - The uncanny absence of nihil –ism
      Nihilism, like botulism, is not an ideology or conceptual system. It is a stance: an emotionally-charged way of being.
    - 190-proof vs. lite nihilism
      Nihilism says nothing means anything—but no one actually believes that. Lite nihilism weakens the claim, to make it plausible.
    - ⚒︎ Qualities of nihilistic thought
      Nihilistic thinking is slow, repetitive, abstract, general, meta, vague, arrogant, and absolutist. It exalts rationality but violates basic logic.
    - Nihilistic reasoning errors
      The many justifications for nihilism rely on a handful of mistaken patterns of reasoning.
    - Lite nihilism, on the way to completion
      Lite nihilism includes a valuable, accurate analysis of the failure of eternalism.
      - Not really meaningful
        “Nothing REALLY means anything” sounds plausible when you feel nihilistic. What does “really” mean, though?
      - No extra-special fancy meanings
        Nihilism rightly denies objective, ultimate, transcendent, absolute, cosmic, and eternal meanings. What is left?
      - No absolute meaning
        Are you adult enough to accept that the world offers no absolute guarantees?
      - No transcendent meaning
        If meaning lives only in Neverland, we can’t make much use of it. Fortunately, it’s here, now.
      - No ultimate meaning
        “Ultimate” means “at the end of a scale.” What is the scale of meaning? Should you want to be at the end of it?
      - No eternal meaning
        Meanings come and go; they are not eternally stable—and that is fine.
      - No cosmic meaning
        Intuitions of “cosmic meaning” root in hunger for personal significance, and in encounters with vastness.
      - No objective meaning
        While the meaning of “objective” is nebulous, learning to relate to meaningness more objectively is possible and worthwhile.
        
        Some other varieties of objectivity
        Nihilistic claims about subjectivity, inherent meaning, universal meaning, and scientific objectivity do not hold up.
      - No meaning without justification
        The rationalist theory of justified action leads to nihilism. Understand your activity as a vivid, variegated landscape instead.
      - No meaning of life as a whole
        Misunderstanding “a life” as an object leads to the complaint that, although meanings exist, life is meaningless overall.
      - ⚒︎ Not enough meaning
        Perception that life is not meaningful enough may involve an unrealistic standard; or ways of increasing meaningfulness may help.
    - Reason your way out of 190-proof nihilism
      Nihilism defends itself from the obviousness of meanings with spurious intellectual arguments. Here’s how to dispel them.
      - No meaning without proof
        A stubborn nihilist can always just refuse to admit that anything is meaningful.
      - ⚒︎ Scientific rationality has proven: everything is meaningless
        An event everyone thinks they remember, but never happened. Science disproved religious theories of meaning, but not meaning itself.
      - No meaning from the Big Bang
        Everything was meaningless at the moment of the Big Bang. What could add meaning after that?
      - No meaning for mortals
        Your future death does not make your present meaningless.
  - ⚒︎ Nihilistic depression illuminates the shadow
    Realizing that eternalism will always fail can result in anguish, pessimism, depression, stoicism, alienation, apathy, exhaustion, and paralysis.
    - ⚒︎ Miserabilism tastes like nihilism
      “Miserabilism” is the stance that everything is awful. It's confused with nihilism because both entail rage and depression.
  - ⚒︎ Nihilistic anxiety opens into play
    Anxiety is a natural reaction to uncertainty. In nihilism, pervasive loss of meaning makes everything uncertain; existential angst is a response.
- ⚒︎ Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God
  Existentialism, a hopeful alternative to rigid meanings, makes wrong metaphysical assumptions, and cannot work. It collapses inevitably into nihilism.
- The complete stance
  Meaning is nebulous, yet patterned; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle. Recognizing this frees us from metaphysical delusions.
  - The appeal of complete stances
    Resolving problems of meaning by recognizing inseparable pattern and nebulosity will improve your life.
  - Peak experiences
    Peak experiences and the complete stance are similar in texture, but differ in intensity, conceptual content, and causes.
  - Obstacles to the complete stance
    Meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity all obviously exist—yet we resist recognizing and admitting this. Why?
  - ⚒︎ Observing meaningness
    How to catch meaningness in action; ways of watching confused and complete stances.
  - Finding the complete stance
    The fundamental method for resolving problems of meaning: by finding nebulosity, pattern, and their inseparable relationship.
  - Textures of completion
    Patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting in the complete stance, which resolves problems of meaning.
    - Wonder
      Wonder at the vastness, beauty, and intricacy of the phenomenal world: a texture of the complete stance.
    - Open-ended curiosity
      Open-ended curiosity gives you the freedom to interact with the world without metaphysical presuppositions.
    - ⚒︎ Humor
      Recognizing the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern gives experience a texture of good humor, and the funny sort too!
    - ⚒︎ Play
      Playfulness, which recognizes the mingled pattern and nebulosity of meaning, is a characteristic texture of activity in the complete stance.
    - ⚒︎ Enjoying the dance of nebulosity and pattern
      Enjoyment of the intertwining dance of nebulosity and pattern is a characteristic texture of the complete stance to meaning.
    - ⚒︎ Creation
      Creation is the characteristic activity of the complete stance; its densest texture.
  - Stabilizing the complete stance
    Going beyond resolutions of specific problems: consistently maintaining an accurate stance toward meaningness.
Unity and diversity
Stances concerning connection and separateness: monism, dualism, and participation.
- Schematic overview: unity and diversity
  Schematic overview of the stances concerning connection and separateness: monism, dualism, and participation.
- Monism and dualism contain each other
  Monism and dualism are opposites. But because each is obviously wrong, each turns into the other when cornered. Sneaky!
- Boundaries, objects, and connections
  Errors of monism and dualism: denying and fixating object boundaries and connections.
  - ⚒︎ Non-existence: Scarlet Leviathan
    Confusing nebulosity with non-existence is a common, sometimes harmful, source of conceptual confusions.
- ⚒︎ Monism: the denial of difference
  Finding the specifics of life unacceptable motivates the escapist fantasy of monism: the stance that All is One, denying diversity.
  - ⚒︎ Critiques of monism
    Monism can be criticized from the points of view of dualism, nihilism, or the complete stance.
    - ⚒︎ The dualist critique of monism
      According to dualist gloss eternalism, monism is wrong because it falsely claims that it is possible to achieve union with God.
    - ⚒︎ The nihilist critique of monism
      The nihilistcritique of monist eternalism is that it is factually false.
    - ⚒︎ The complete stance’s critique of monism
      From the point of view of the complete stance, monist eternalism fails on its own terms. It cannot deliver what it promises.
- ⚒︎ Dualism: the fixation of difference
  Fear of contamination by the messiness of reality—always changing and ambiguous—motivates dualism, the stance that denies connection.
- ⚒︎ Participation
  Participation is the recognition that both boundaries and connections are both nebulous yet real; neither objective nor subjective.
Selfness
Abandoning selflessness and egoism equally, we can play with the ambiguous self/other boundary; supple, skillful selfing for successful, satisfying interaction.
- Schematic overview: self
  A schematic overview of stances regarding the meaningness of the self: non-self, True Self, and intermittently continuing.
- ⚒︎ A billion tiny spooks
  Representationalism tried to exorcise the ghost in the machine, but succeeded only in splitting it into innumerable tiny ghosts.
- ⚒︎ The true self
  Monism and dualism both offer concepts of the supposed true self as a coherent entity.
- ⚒︎ Selflessness
  Several views of selflessness, in different religions and philosophies.
- ⚒︎ Intermittently continuing
  An optimistic view of the self as incoherent, but not non-existent, and not necessarily problematic.
  - ⚒︎ Neither objective nor subjective
    Meanings are interactions: neither inherent in external objects nor merely mental. They are on-going, collaborative activities.
Purpose
Dividing purposes into higher and mundane, mission pursues higher ends and rejects pragmatism; materialism seeks only selfish goals. Both are mistakes.
- Schematic overview: purpose
  A schematic overview of stances toward purpose: mission, materialism, and enjoyable usefulness.
- Mission
  It is attractive to think that we each have a unique, transcendent, ultimate purpose in life. Unfortunately, this belief is both false and harmful.
  - Mission: defects and obstacles
    The delusion that you can find your true, unique personal life-purpose causes only suffering and failure.
  - What should I do with my life?
    Just discover your unique talent, follow your passion, and success is guaranteed—this is terrible advice!
  - ⚒︎ Politics make for mediocre missions
    Taking political activism as a personal mission usually messes up your life, and messes up politics too.
  - ⚒︎ Antidotes to fixating higher purposes
    How to let go of attractive, mistaken idea that you have one ultimate purpose in life—without falling into nihilism
  - ⚒︎ Antidotes to denying mundane purposes
    How to come to grips with the mundane messes you've made while pursuing a grand mission, so you can clean them up.
- Materialism
  Materialism says that only mundane purposes like money, sex, and power count. It wrongly rejects higher purposes—but those too are not ultimate.
  - Rejecting materialism
    Common critiques of materialism, from religion, political idealism, personal idealism, and nihilism.
  - ⚒︎ Materialism: defects and obstacles
    Materialism fails on its own terms. It cannot deliver the satisfaction it promises.
  - ⚒︎ Antidotes to fixating mundane purposes
    Ways to find freedom from the compulsive need-driven quality of mundane desires, and enjoyment free from grasping.
  - ⚒︎ Antidotes to denying higher purposes
    How to recover compassion and creativity when in the grip of self-centered materialism.
- Mission and materialism mingled
  Mingling mission and materialism attempts to gain both self-indulgent and self-justifying goals—but loses both enjoyment and empathetic joy.
- ⚒︎ Enjoyable usefulness
  Recognizing the nebulosity of purposes frees us to enjoy life and be useful to others.
  - ⚒︎ Want what you like
    Discovering what you actually like can be surprising, and supports enjoyable usefulness as your purpose in life.
⚒︎ Personal value
Agonizing over whether you are ordinary or special—or feeling smug about one or the other—can be resolved by choosing to be noble instead.
- Schematic overview: value
  A schematic overview of stances toward personal value: specialness, ordinariness, and nobility.
- ⚒︎ Specialness
  Specialness is a sense of having been picked out for destiny by the Cosmic Plan. That causes you and others much trouble.
- ⚒︎ Ordinariness
  If we could just manage to be ordinary, we would not have the responsibility of living up to our potential. Fortunately, ordinariness is impossible.
- ⚒︎ Nobility
  Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others.
⚒︎ Capability
Resolving a false dichotomy between unrealistic views: being a helpless victim and being totally responsible for your circumstances.
- Schematic overview: capability
  A schematic overview of stances regarding issues of capability.
- ⚒︎ Total responsibility
  The delusion that we are, or can be, totally responsible for reality is prevalent in some religious and psychotherapeutic circles.
- ⚒︎ Victim-think
  Victim-think is a strategy for denying all responsibility—on the part of individuals and social groups.
- ⚒︎ Light-heartedness
  Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world.
⚒︎ Ethics
Available ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist; both are useless. We must recognize that ethics are both nebulous and meaningful.
- Schematic overview: ethics
  A schematic overview of fundamental stances regarding ethics.
- ⚒︎ Ethical eternalism
  An ethical system that reliably delivers correct moral judgements is a wishful fantasy. No such system is possible.
  - ⚒︎ Utilitiarianism is an eternalism
    Utilitarianism promises to eliminate ethical uncertainty, but instead replaces a difficult, messy problem with an impossible, tidy one.
- ⚒︎ Ethical nihilism
  Ethical nihilism is the denial of all ethical rightness and wrongness.
- ⚒︎ Ethical responsiveness
  Ethics is centrally important to humans, and is not a matter of choice, but is fluid and has no definite source.
⚒︎ Authority
A better alternative to the dysfunctional stances of mindlessly opposing authority and mindlessly obeying.
- Schematic overview: authority
  A schematic overview of stances toward social authority.
- ⚒︎ Reasonable respectability
  Reasonable respectability: the sheep's stance to social authority.
- ⚒︎ Romantic rebellion
  Romantic rebellion does not seriously try to overthrow the system; it is faux-heroic posturing. It can be harmful, but also inspires great art.
- ⚒︎ Freedom
  Value social order as a resource, satirize it as an impediment.
⚒︎ Sacredness
Resolving the twin delusions that nothing is sacred and that the only sacred things are those designated by some authority.
- Schematic overview: sacredness
  Schematic overview of stances toward sacredness: religiosity, secularism, kadag.
- ⚒︎ Religiosity
  Religiosity is the confused, eternalistic view that the sacred and profane can be clearly separated.
- ⚒︎ Secularism
  Secularism is the stance that sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacred.
- ⚒︎ Kadag
  Kadag: Because nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred.
Meaningness and Time: past, present, future
The problems of meaningness we face now are dramatically different from those of the past. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources.
- How meaning fell apart
  Over the past century, systems of meaning gradually disintegrated, and a series of new modes of meaningness developed.
  - A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything
    This chart is an overview of Meaningness and Time: the past, present, and future of culture, society, and our selves.
  - In praise of choicelessness
    The choiceless mode of understanding meaning has no “becauses.” Explanations are unnecessary because you are unaware of any alternatives.
  - The glory of systems
    Systems of society, culture, and the self were the foundation of the modern world. Their glories have passed.
  - Invented traditions and timeworn futures
    Invented traditions and timeworn futures are ideological time-distortion strategies. Highly effective in propaganda.
  - Systems of meaning all in flames
    How and why modernity failed. All systems of meaning—religious, political, artistic, psychological—began to fall apart. Nihilism seemed the only alternative.
    - The collapse of rational certainty
      Modernity was built on certainty in science and mathematics. That was revealed as delusional during the early 20th century.
  - Countercultures: modernity’s last gasp
    The hippies and the Moral Majority both tried to rescue systematic eternalism—and failed. We live amongst their wreckage.
    - What makes a counterculture?
      Countercultures defined as new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems: there were two in the late 20th century.
    - Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures
      The hippie counterculture was structurally and functionally similar to the Moral Majority Christian Right counterculture a decade later.
    - Renegotiating self and society
      How—and why!—countercultures sought to reform psychologies and polities: to counteract alienation, anxiety, and anomie.
    - Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self
      The 1960s-80s countercultures abandoned rationality because they believed it negated all meaning. They were wrong.
    - The personal is political
      The 1960s-80s countercultures dissolved the boundaries between self and society, ethical and political—setting us up for decades of culture war.
    - Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise
      In the 1960s-80s, American politics shifted from economic to sacredness issues. This damaged public discourse, but created a new two-track class system.
    - ⚒︎ Countercultures: modern mythologies
      The Religious Right and New Age Left both promoted time-distorting meta-myths—imaginary past golden ages and implausible future utopias—to hide their defects.
    - Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism
      Fundamentalism is not traditional; it is a modern, countercultural movement, opposed to tradition and to post-modernity.
    - ⚒︎ Counter-cultures: thick and wide
      The hippie and Moral Majority movements both developed broad, deep cultures, with innovative approaches to every aspect of life, from music to dentistry.
    - Why both countercultures failed
      Failure to find new foundations for meaning, to recognize diversity, to provide community, and to transcend opposition: all doomed counterculturalism.
    - Wreckage: the culture war
      The culture war, political polarization, Baby Boomer bafflement: the unending zombie slugfest pairing the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s.
    - Completing the countercultures
      At root, the culture war is not about abortion, gay marriage, or marijuana. It is about shared misunderstandings of the nature of meaning.
  - Subcultures: the diversity of meaning
    The subcultural era (1975-2000) recognized the diversity of meanings, and provided a new type of supportive, voluntary social group.
    - ⚒︎ Subcultures: meanings at play
      With no responsibility to justify universal norms, or for solving social problems, subcultures were freed to play with meanings.
    - ⚒︎ Subsocieties: urban tribes
      Subsocieties, close-knit social groups organized around subsocieties: a possible model for positive future social oganization.
      - ⚒︎ Archipelago: subcultural politics
        “Archipelago” is a political model in which everyone can choose what social system to live in. It’s impractical, but points to better solutions.
    - Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
      How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.
  - Atomization: the kaleidoscope of meaning
    The global internet atomizes cultures, societies, and selves into tiny brilliant shards. Meaning has lost context and coherence. Now what?
    - Not a good decade for thinking
      Cultural atomization—the widespread loss of conceptual coherence—has made serious intellectual work much more difficult in the twenty-teens.
  - ⚒︎ Fluidity: a preview
    Fluidity addresses the atomization of culture, society, and self with ships that sail the sea of meaning: collaborative, improvised, intimate, and playful.
  - Modes of meaningness, eternalism and nihilism
    From fundamentalism to atomization, different modes of relating to meaning overemphasize pattern or nebulosity.
- Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness
  A positive and realistic vision for the future of society, culture, and self, drawing lessons from recent history.
- ⚒︎ Sailing the seas of meaningness
  Social, cultural, and personal fluidity create vessels to navigate the ocean of atomized meanings, steering between nihilism and eternalism.
  - ⚒︎ Fluid self in relationship
    Fluidity recognizes that you have selves, rather than being a self, and that the self/other distinction is nebulous though patterned.
    - The Cofounders
      The path from professionalism to a deliberately-developmental relationship: a tale of startup cofounders.
  - ⚒︎ Fluid society
    A fluid society ideally provides the benefits of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity, while avoiding their defects.
  - ⚒︎ Fluid culture: metamodernism
    Metamodernism resolves the modernity/postmodernity conflict in favor of reconstruction, collaboration, ambiguity, and engagement.
Appendices
A series of appendices, including a glossary and suggestions for further reading elsewhere.
- Appendix: Glossary
  Definitions of words I've used in technical or non-standard ways in Meaningness.
- Appendix: Further reading
  Explore the ideas of Meaningness in greater depth by reading the books that inspired it
- Appendix: Terminological choices
  The Meaningness book gives some words distinctive technical meanings; some definitional choices could be misleading.
  - Terminology: Complete
    I borrowed “complete,” as a term for stances that allow both nebulosity and pattern, from Dzogchen.
  - Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern
    Why I use “nebulosity” and “pattern,” rather than the related Buddhist terms “emptiness” and “form.”
  - Terminology: Non-dual
    I avoid the term non-dual because it is used to mean several different things, causing confusion.

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