3. Antimanifestos 🔗
October 19, 2015
In which I develop the idea of an antimanifesto — a set of live contradictions you steer by, rather than settled beliefs you bury as habits — and argue that divergent exploration, driven by curiosity rather than social consensus, is the more honest posture.
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1/ Manifesto: beliefs you treat as self-evident, and ideally bury in subconscious as habits of mind.
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2/ Antimanifesto: contradictions that have your active attention, that you steer by.
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3/ Eg manifesto item: "...[G]lobal civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm." (from #accelerate #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics)
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4/ Example antimanifesto item: "Truth vs happiness" from my philosopher's abacus: The Philosopher’s Abacus
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5/ Manifestos are way more popular than antimanifestos. Mine is in fact the only antimanifesto I know of.
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6/ Good reason for this. If you act on the basis of certainty to seek more certainty, manifestos speed you up, antimanifestos slow you down.
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7/ On the other hand, if you act on the basis of doubt to seek out greater doubts, antimanifestos speed you up, manifestos slow you down.
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8/ When driven by a manifesto, you try to converge to a fully certain utopia, when driven by an antimanifesto, you diverge into a mystery
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9/ A manifesto defines a finite game by inducing rules, an antimanifesto characterizes an infinite game like a fingerprint
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10/ The underlying drive of a manifesto is social connection. The underlying drive of an antimanifesto is individual curiosity.
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11/ Before now, I hadn't connected my antipathy to manifestos to my preference for divergent exploration. They are 2 sides of the same coin.
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12/ Ms and AMs can co-exist and productively interact, but to seek synthesis is actually to try and colonize antimanifestos with manifestos
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13/ Furiously resisting attempts at synthesis, however, turns an antimanifesto into a manifesto (cough libertarians cough)
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14/ To follow an antimanifesto is to accept both convergence and divergence w/o resistance, while noting that divergence prevails over time
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15/ To follow a manifesto on the other hand, you eventually have to actively resist divergence.
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16/ Poirot is an archetypal antimanifesto-ist. He only promises to uncover the truth, not to save people. Truth trumps social connection.
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17/ This is deep reason manifestos are explicit, but antimanifestos rarely are. Where truth prevails, divergence kills manifestos naturally
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18/ To force the convergence that a manifesto requires, you will eventually need to deny truths, even if you don't lie to yourself overtly.
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19/ I'm increasingly convinced that societies are not based on shared lies. They merely cannot be based on shared truths.
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20/ The DNA of a society can be found in the nature and length of its growing denials, not its static manifestos.