The War on Metacognitive Integrity — Part I
Civilization depends on the defense of Promethean character in investment, industry, the arts, and personal practice.
In undergraduate studies, I had the privilege of attending lectures by Professor Bryan Mark Rigg, a military historian and author. He posed a valuable question on the role of religiosity in warfare. The question is always relevant. But as the United States retracts its global security guarantees and blanket financial supports, nations whose development has been predicated on this superstructure will be far more prone to conflict in the decades to come. Moreover, the question is also relevant to election season domestic violence and the central bank’s CCP virus lockdown response in the United States.
Machenschaft
Religiosity is nature’s psycho-social tool to enroll groups into cooperation and mutual defense. This means that there is a central utilitarian feature of religiosity which seeks to fundamentally enframe and dominate nature and man’s role in it. Even the most abstract religious structures could be thought of as the product of a fundamental trait of man, an instrumental will driving him to dominate and control nature. Religiosity is a pre-scientific version of Martin Heidegger’s machenschaft, that collective belief structures originate from the prevailing state of technology, and are pre-human. That they originated in pre-homo sapien hominids, and are ontologically prior to humanity itself.
That the mechanism of religiosity is pre-human means that one of nature’s, rather than man’s, means that the disturbing human tendency to herd is built into the structure of the psyche itself. Despite its nature as unconsidered, herding is a teleological mechanism imbued into some swath of humanity, and with no possibility for extraction. The natural desire for undifferentiation, and toward unconsidered mass consciousness, is a property of the universe, experienced in a certain specific, subjective emotional way by its carriers. These carriers bizarrely come to experience this desire for undifferentiation and unconsidered mass consciousness as part of their own identity, emotionally and psychologically conflating pre-homo sapien impulses with individuation. Group membership becomes more important than individual character, and religiosity becomes more important than truth and truth seeking.
The unconsidered goal of religiosity can only be achieved if the psycho-social regime is sufficiently coherent so as to psychologically blunt a large number into unquestioning adherence. Internal coherence is its central feature, over and above its illuminative power.
This is not to sleight religious adherence or practice. Those who practice something religiously need not be unconsidered ideologues. But it is decidedly to decamp religiosity from the realm of truth seeking, and into the realm of model building exercises useful in the practical, instrumental approach toward the natural constraints which confine man. The Greeks made a discreet distinction between these two realms — expressed between the personas of titan brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus.
The Mystery of the Split Personality
In the myth, Epimetheus implores Prometheus to participate in fashioning man from the abyss like they have fashioned other animals, but forgets to reserve for man a defining essence. As a remedy for this, Prometheus steals fire from the gods to imbue man with the character of forethought, with the forge of technological development. Contemporary thinker Bernard Steigler compares the deeper symbolic traits of the brothers: promethea, a deterministic, a-priori, anticipatory resoluteness, and epimethea, a forgetful, a-posteriori absent-mindedness and the tendency to slip into an unreflective adherence to mass consciousness or ideology. As Leo Strauss wrote in Natural Rights and History, “Epimetheus, the being in whom thought follows production, represents nature in the sense of materialism, according to which thought comes later than thoughtless bodies and their thoughtless motions.” Religiosity belongs with Epimetheus.
The existence of epimethia in major swaths of mankind indicates that there is a predominating occultation and concealment of the true nature of things. This occultation is the product of the deliberate creation of religiosity’s heuristic tools through which man interacts with the world — a series of proxies and shorthand rules rather than specific essentials. In Zen terminology, the pointing fingers rather than the moon itself. Epimethia refers to the realm wherein thought merely follows what already exists, as though thought were a kind of cognitive or psycho-social consumerism, vacationing open-mouthed through a menu of pre-promulgated experiences and worldview narratives. Epimethia is also akin to lethomai, a sense of forgetfulness or intentional ignoring, a kind of conceptual or psycho-social entropy.
This means that truth, alethaeia, by contrast, is always exceptional, the feature of cognitive and psychic reality NOT covered-over by Epimethean psycho-social consumerism. To realize a truth is an illumination or a dis-covery of what is covered over in the midst of predominating ideological occultation. Truth is rare. Truth is surprise. Every discovery of a truth is a Promethean act of theft, theft of explanatory power away from prevailing heuristics. Thus there is a spirit of originality to truth as well, where truth precedes production, is a-priori, and is pre-materialist. In order for mankind as a whole to overcome the prevailing Epimethean psycho-social entropy, truth-seeking must be contained within it as well. Truth-seeking centers around the individual property of grit, as a bulwark against the entropy of the mass. And this grit is made possible only through a deeper, instinctual sense of transcendent meaning possessed in the core of the Promethean character.
In signal theory, Claude Shannon echoed this insight by demonstrating that valuable information is the rare exception of an electrical pulse down a wire as juxtaposed to the rule of a static, zero-amplitude steady state. In economics, a competitive market in which every possible business outcome is known is also a market of zero profit, and therefore that profit is surprise.
Predominant narratives, ideologies, and structures of worldview are Epimethean steady states and serve to conceal truth. Discovery and truth seeking are Promethean acts of rebellion against a prevailing occultation. Therefore, consensus is always wrong, not merely because change is inevitable, but because the teleological purpose consensus is the concealment of deeper alethiea.
Machination
Heidegger had a powerful insight: that technology preceded science, rather than the reverse. Homo-sapien morphology and body shape evolved through pre-homo-sapien tool use and development. Development of tools was a precondition for scientific inquiry. This also meant the modern scientific world view was also born from the same instrumental will as religiosity.
As the vector of Epimethean religiosity in a society (or a financial system or other structure) densifies, the less surprise and profit making there is, the less replenishment of social or financial capital there is. The structure heads toward entropic collapse through moral or financial bankruptcy.
The more bankrupt the world of epimethia, the more fearful it is of Promethean theft — of the truth telling which disrupts already-fragile prevailing structures. The more economic and political structures are dependent on psycho-social conventionality, the more threatening the truth seeker. The more accumulated moral and financial entropy in the society, the closer it gets to wholesale breakdown (paroxysm). And because we know that the instinct for truth seeking is found in an individual’s search for meaning and a sense of self-awareness which supersedes a notion of group-derived identity, the instinct for self-awareness itself must be attacked by Epimethean agents. Here, mimicry must be demanded above all things. Mimicry as a chief public value means an Epimethean oracle must then provide “Culture-as-a-Service” which institutionalizes a policy to surreptitiously exact a rent from the quantity of individual agency in the group to keep afloat its entropic social order.
The Pessimistic Mathematics of Mimicry
A fictitious society of pure stability could be represented by a standard Gaussian distribution of Promethean and Epimethean agents. However, the more interdependency and mimicry in a system, the greater the distribution’s mode is than its mean (and likely the more peaked it becomes as well). The most commonly-observed social behavior moving away from the average outcome of these behaviors reflects a belief that only a progressively narrowing set of behaviors can be profitable. Furthermore, as the system increases its total quantity of mimicry, the more implicitly pessimistic it is about its own solvency and future opportunity. The greater the mode of a distribution, more negative the skew and the more fragile the homeostasis.
As an example, in 2020, the S&P 500 has been led by a handful of “tech” companies which have benefited from lockdowns. Online ordering from Amazon, entertainment in Facebook and Netflix, gadgets from Microsoft and Apple to help mentally circumvent the world of atoms, and a master dispenser in Alphabet. Meanwhile, the other ~490 companies have yoked onto government stimulus, and are now tending to believe that subsidies from a heirarchy rather than authentic demand from a messy heterarchy of markets are where future incentives lie. This reflects a drastically narrowing beliefs about profitable behavior, as well as an increase in the rent extracted against the quantity of individual agency, as market transactions are voluntary and subsidies are involuntary.
This narrowing belief system is a reassertion of the market and social religiosity which holds that the lucky connection to privileged feudal currency distribution centers is more powerful than the deterministic view that industry and entrepreneurs build the future through their vision and grit. It is a shift from determinism to probabilism.
Cultural shifts from probabilism to determinism within a context of optimistic behavior lead to great revolutions of human well-being, a similar move within a pessimistic context leads to great war and destruction.
If the self-correcting mechanism of Promethean metacognitive integrity and this ingrained sense of transcendent meaning in the Promethean character is not increasing, then the prevailing religiosity will continue to exhibit that it assumes probability of negative systemic outcomes. This translates to the mode of our ecosystem continuing to move to the right of our mean. It likewise means the system will have drifted from a Promethean deterministic regime of a-priori resoluteness, where thought leads production, and towards a probabilistic regime of Epimethean a-posteriori consumerism where production leads thought. All the while, mass unconsidered participation shows participants drastically understate the size of the left tail and likelihood of systemic collapse. Until the point of paroxysm and reset, where once the system has moved from determinism to probabilism, and from optimism to pessimism, the war on Promethean metacognitive integrity must continually increase. The final move from probabilistic to deterministic pessimism is never far behind.
The moral defense of one’s own and others’ Promethean metacognitive integrity is the central act of virtuous investment and productive work. Civilization depends on it.
About Ross Calvin
Ross was the CIO of Agrigentum Capital, Ltd., a private investment manager focused on transitional macro themes and volatility. He is now the founder and CEO of Thermahash, a blockchain infrastructure provider.
