An Excerpt from “As Far as I Can Tell”
The following excerpt is from the first chapter of As Far as I Can Tell.
We are born into this world disoriented. Despite our best efforts, because the vast complexity of reality exceeds our comprehension, the structures of belief we develop to represent and navigate reality eventually prove insufficient. Successful navigation requires constant reorientation within changing circumstances by the light of eternal truth. Such orientation is made possible by the Logos, which reveals truth to the extent that we act in harmony with virtue.
One Man’s Shipwreck
I grew up in a devoted Christian household. When I was five, my father was recruited by his friend, a young pastor, to serve as the right hand man at a newly founded church. My little sisters and I learned Bible stories at makeshift Sunday school while the church was under construction. Upon completion we often played hide-and-seek between stacks of chairs while Dad worked. Christianity was the air I breathed – it explained my world without competition.
That world was shattered when my best friend gave me a book on the big bang followed by a copy of Anton LaVey’s satanic bible. With my protective bubble popped, I came to be disgusted by the hypocrisy I saw in the Christian church. I rejected its teachings in favor of a materialist atheism, and the meaning of my life turned inside out.
I was haunted by a deep sadness until I learned to keep myself busy chasing girls, social status, and academic success (discovering the reality behind Teddy Roosevelt’s famous remark that “black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough”) and eventually hustled my way into a high-paying investment banking job. I dabbled in Daoism and Buddhism as a banker (i.e. listened to some Alan Watts lectures), but it was not until I left to start my first business that I began to seriously reevaluate my beliefs. While my atheism had freed me to busy myself with practical concerns, it failed to provide the orienting structure I needed to contend with the daunting freedom of entrepreneurship. I naively discovered and adopted Tony Robbins’ system of New Age sophistry, which provided me with direction and apparent success until COVID struck in 2020.
I was shipwrecked. In the months preceding the lockdowns, inspired by Robbins, two friends and I had left jobs and moved across the country to begin hosting seminars of our own; we had not considered the possibility that a global pandemic could cause our gatherings to be outlawed. We were trapped inside our apartment and could not afford the rent. In a desperate attempt to stay afloat, we launched a marketing campaign for my old business, using every sophisticated rhetorical technique we knew to persuade strangers to hand over their money. We made zero sales. All I could do was sit in my room and think about what I had done.
The Peterson Model
As my worldview and the life I had built on it fell apart, I began exploring the work of Dr. Jordan Peterson. His Maps of Meaning model of orientation helped me to understand my crisis.
We orient ourselves by constantly – often unconsciously – asking three questions:
1. The situation question, “What is?”
2. The destination question, “What should be?”
3. The path question, “How do I get there?”
Together, these questions form a simple map:
The path expands into a nested series of subordinate maps until terminating in one particular action.
For example:
As an investment banker, I wanted to maximize my income, half of which was awarded as a performance-based bonus. In order to earn the largest possible bonus, I had to outperform my peers.
Again, I unconsciously asked the three questions, and my path expanded: At the time, machine learning was emerging as a hot technology in the finance industry, and although I had no background in computer science, I knew that designing a strategically significant algorithm would establish me as a top analyst at my firm. Therefore, to secure the top bonus, I had to learn to code.
This subordinate, nested map directed me to a particular action which I believed would lead to achieving my ultimate goal, and my confidence in this causal relationship motivated me to act.
As I studied Peterson’s model, I realized that every motivated and effective season of my life had started with confident, well-ordered answers to these three orienting questions. It was as if my answers formed a tower: A deep foundation grounded the whole endeavor of my life in sustaining meaning, and successive layers ascended to a capstone of effective, particular action.
But every successive map was vulnerable to precedent flaws. The most important part of a tower – of matter or meaning – is its foundation, for however strong the upper layers, if the foundation crumbles, the entire structure will fall. Based on Robbins’ teaching, I had constructed a tower of deeply meaningful, highly effective orientation, but COVID, like an earthquake, exposed its fragility – and not merely by obstructing live seminars. The cracks emanated from the depths of my foundation: Our desperate marketing campaign revealed the fundamentally manipulative nature of the rhetorical skills I had acquired and the false, subtly dehumanizing axioms of the philosophy I had adopted to justify them. As a consequence, my entire orienting structure was destroyed.
The Primary Orienting Question
Destination and pathway depend on what is, so that is where orientation must begin.
So, what is? Certainly, something is – whatever that something is – and you do not have to take my word for it. If you are reading these words, you can confirm for yourself that there is something and not nothing. We can call this something-and-not-nothing-ness, this is-ness, Being. No matter what is, if something is, then Being is. Thanks to Being, then, our question is valid. But what is?
Reality is. Reality is what is. Reality is whatever has being. If something is not, it is not real (the idea of fire-breathing dragons is real, but the dragons themselves are not). Reality changes across time, but as long as something is, Reality is, and Being remains the same.
Truth is, and so is Fallacy. Truth regards, submits to, and faithfully represents Being. Fallacy disregards, rebels against, and misrepresents Being.
Our fundamental choice in response to Being is submission or rebellion. Moment to moment, we are free to be true or false, to consent or resist. I am able to faithfully represent the being of a thing:
…but doing so requires me to consensually regard and submit to the being of the thing (in this instance, to allow the being of the circle to enter my mind, form words in my mind, and direct my body to transmit those words in writing). The thing will not force me to regard or represent it truly. I am free to disregard and misrepresent it.
To be continued…