Stoic Meditation #14 - Diversity and Unity

"Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth." - Rex Stout

Jan 27, 2025

Light figures in a lot of allegories designed to explain or simplify something complex. A few retrieved from the Natural Intelligence (NI) in my head:

A guiding star or a lighthouse - A fixed reference when things are chaotic, uncertain, or confusing. In the case of a lighthouse, hope, safety, and comfort of knowing someone is out there tending to a guiding light during times of difficulty.
A flash of lightning or flipping a light switch to "on" - A sudden insight or realization that coalesces a confusing and disorganized collection of ideas.
Plato's Cave - We are all prisoners chained in a cave and are only aware of the shadows cast on the cave wall by a fire behind us and are ignorant of the worlds outside the cave. Escaping the cave, into the sunlight, represents enlightenment.

There were others that occurred to me, but I expect you get the idea. One thing they seem to have in common, at least those that I thought of, is that they reveal something outside of or bigger than ourselves. Or speak to a deeper process that we don't or can't fully understand with our limited perspective. We are drawn toward something we do not control and nonetheless seek - the light at the end of the tunnel, the limelight, or the distant farmhouse light in the window that says "Here are people. Here is refuge from the dark."

For many years I've framed my thinking about diversity and unity in terms of light. The properties of light have served as a useful frame when thinking about what people do with the raw materials of Nature as they seek to make meaning of the world around them. I think of each of the billions of minds wandering around on the planet as a prism, as a crystal that filters and splits the raw light of reality, distilling them down to something each prism can accept as "real."

The tragedy is that we seem to have phenomenal skills at splitting raw materials of Nature apart, but poor skills for for putting things back together again. That is to say, for the vast majority of human beings, this process is directional in a way that highly favors splitting things apart. In the context of evolution, this makes sense. We are meaning generating machines and evolved this way so that we would survive. The species moved forward by responding to false positives faster than it would have, if at all, by trusting false negatives. The academic charade is that a name is made for one's self by finding ever finer levels of distinction and separation, no matter how ridiculous or solipsistic.

There is more to the way I've crafted this particular mental model. Each iteration has enabled me to remain resilient and open-minded to ideas, regardless the source. It has made it ease to recognize the opinions of others (as well as my own) for what they are: opinions. I can appreciate, without necessarily accepting, the mismatches that may occur between opinion and behavior. With this model in mind it's easier to allow people the space to figure things out for themselves.

Where is the good? In our choices. Where is the evil? In our choices. Where is neither of them? In those things we do not choose.

Epictetus, Discourses 2.16.1

I wasn't alone in thinking this way about diversity. Years ago, it seemed as if cooperation and support across lines such as race, ethnicity, sex, gender, age, and such was easier and comfortable. Not perfect, but moving in a good direction. I'm not so naive to think this is how it was everywhere. It wasn't. But somewhere along the journey, diversity has been weaponized by grifters, envious bottom feeders, and an over-credentialed but under-educated self-appointed clerisy. No longer a vital ingredient to be added with skill and moderation in a delicious soup of cooperation and genuine tolerance, diversity has been posited as a dish unto itself and force fed to the masses by belligerent sycophants and arrogant masters of media. The degree of openness I and others nurtured and practiced was used against us and branded as a sure sign of nearly the exact opposite of what it was, in fact, achieving.

As a consequence, the capacity for tolerance and self-actualization became worse everywhere. The grifters, envious bottom feeders, and self-appointed clerisy worked to turn the world inside out. Weakness was championed as strength, censorship was required for freedom, unapproved words were violence and approved violence was "mostly peaceful." The fundamental principal of Stoicism was, quite literally, turned inside out. Externals - the things outside our control - were expected to match our internal desires while our character and our reasoned choices - the things within our control - were outsourced to the grifters, envious bottom feeders, and self-appointed clerisy.

At least, that's what was attempted. Not for the first time in human history and undoubtedly not the last.

This is were we are today. Awakening from a masterfully orchestrated effort to preserve an insidious strain of national groupthink held together by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The working class - the people who do the actual work to generate wealth and prosperity - has been living under the constraints of an Abilene Paradox that continues to hold sway across most of Western Civilization. There seems to be a shift in the making. If so, expect it to be a bit rough and shaky for a while. The pendulum wobbles when it changes direction. In the words of the immortal Sage of the Open Road: