So last time we took a look at the second half of Aristotle and his further developments of the Axial Age’s understanding of meaning and wisdom. We took a look more at the world side of things and we took a look at his worldview, with two components: his conformity theory, which is an important alternative understanding of knowledge—it’s a contact epistemology, an intimate knowing and being with something—and how plausible that contact epistemology actually is, and then we also looked at a plausible (turned out to be false, but a plausible) model of the world that is very consonant and consistent with that conformity theory: this is a geocentric world that is moved by natural motion. It’s a cosmos.
Then we use that to discuss how the theory of the world and the theory of how we know the world and be within the world are intimately connected and mutually supporting, and you get worldview attunement, and how that creates existential modes in which we are co-identifying the agent and the arena and creating the meta-meaning, the relationship that makes all individual acts and events and situations and places meaningful for us, and how important that consonance is between our existential mode and our intellectual understanding. Aristotle is so prominent because of his capacity to create a worldview that lasts for a millennium, and because it’s so well-attuned a worldview.
We then paused from our discussion of the Axial Age in Greece and we moved to the Axial Age in India for the explicit purpose of trying to discuss the impact of the Mindfulness Revolution. Part of the thesis of the series is the mindfulness revolution is in response to the meaning crisis in the West and growing confluence between Buddhism and cognitive science is an attempt to address and provide solutions to the meaning crisis in the West. We started by looking at the figure who epitomizes the Axial Revolution within ancient India and that’s Siddhartha Gautama. We began by looking at his myth—his mythological biography if you want to put it that way—and I remind you again how I am using the world ‘myth’.
We began by taking a look at his early life within the palace. We stepped aside and examined the palace as a mythological representation of a particular existential mode. We talked about two different existential modes, following the work of Fromm; it’s also convergent of work from Buber, and other important thinkers (Stephen Batchelor is going to make use of this distinction, etc.).
Fromm talks about two modes:
The having mode that’s organized around meeting our ‘having needs’ in which we perceive the world categorically. We want to manipulate it and solve our problems and control it.
The being mode which is organized around our ‘being needs’. These are needs that are met by becoming something: mature, virtuous, love.
We then talked about the possibility of modal confusion: being locked in the having mode in trying to meet your being needs within the having mode. So trying to meet your need for maturity by having a car, or meeting your need for being in love by having lots of sex. We talked about the fact that you can become enmeshed in modal confusion and how that becomes a vicious cycle because as your being needs are frustrated you pursue evermore the misframed projects that the modal confusion is giving you. You try more to have things as opposed to more and more become what you need to become.
Then I suggested to you that being in the palace is a mythological representation of this kind of modal confusion in which we are stuck in the having mode and of course this also had one important cultural point—I did say at the beginning we would talk about about that—we would develop a way of talking about the connection between the meaning crisis and other crises we are facing, so issues about a market economy and a commodification of everything and everyone by inducing modal confusion it is possible to sell you more. As your identity becomes more and more a political and economic thing and commodity that should be categorically understood and manipulated, the more and more I can sell you things and sell you ideas and manipulate you accordingly. So this has important ramifications for us now. That’s why it’s a myth; because it has important ramifications for us right now.
The agent-arena relationship is, in my view, one of the core concepts in the course. My version is that you perceive yourself as an ‘agent’, able to ‘take actions’ (often according to some script) in a way that is matched up to perceiving your environment as ‘an arena’ that ‘presents affordances’. Much of familiarizing yourself with a new place or culture or job or so on is learning how to properly understand the agent-arena relationship (“oh, when I want this done, I go over there and push those buttons”). The CFAR taste/shaping class is, I think, about deliberately seeing this happen in your mind. Importantly, basically all actions will ground their meaning in this agent-arena relationship.
One of the things that I think is behind a lot of ‘modern alienation’ is that the arenas are so narrow, detached, and voluntary, in contrast to the arenas perceived by a hunter-gatherer tribesman.
Why is ‘voluntary’ alienating? For example, suppose I’m in a soccer league; I have some role to play, and some satisfaction in how well I play that role, and so on, but at the root of the satisfaction I get from the soccer league is that I chose to participate. There’s not really ‘something bigger than me’ there; I could have decided to be in a frisbee league instead, or play Minecraft, or watch Netflix, or so on and so on. Around me are other people making their own choices, which will generally only line up with my by accident or selection effect. [“Huh, everyone at the soccer league is interested in soccer, and none of my non-league friends are into soccer.”]
The Dragon Army experiment was a study in contrasts, here; 11 people were in the house, and attendance at the mandatory events was generally 11, and attendance at voluntary events was generally 2 or 3. Even among people who had self-selected to live together, overlap in interests was only rarely precise enough that it was better to do something together than doing a more narrowly matched thing alone. But this makes it harder to build deep meaning out of a narrow voluntary arena, when it’s a nearly random choice selected from a massive list of options.
[See also the Gervais Principle, in particular the bit where the Losers value diversity because it allows everyone to be above-average in a way that is only meaningful to them. Shared meaning means conflict over a single ranking, instead of peace between many different rankings. But that’s also how you get Lotus!]
Yeah, i think you hit the nail with your point on voluntary. The thing i hear most often from people who experience a meaning crisis is “Why”—“Why this specifically? Why this and not this other thing? What’s the purpose?”. This also relates to me to Choices are Bad. If you have lots of options it’s much harder to answer this nagging “Why” question. When the possibility space is large you need much more powerful principles to locate the right choice (This also relates to relevance realization).
The process that produces that question about meaning might start out with simply trying to decide what to do, notice the option space is so large that it needs better principles to successfully locate something, then start asking questions about purpose and meaning. The distress is an inability to locate relevance.
My brother used to say that whenever someone started to talk with him about “the meaning of life” he wants to just go to them, give them a really good massage, and ask if the question still bothers them. It of course doesn’t answer or diffuse the question, but it has a point. When they’re getting a massage it’s fairly clear what the right thing to do is, try to focus on the massage and don’t worry about other stuff. It gives them peace from mind.
And I was once able to answer someone that question well enough that it seemed it actually gave her enough clarity and understanding to be peaceful and satisfied. In jargon, my answer gave her the tools to better find what’s relevant (At least if I’m not too optimistic in my interpretation of her response, she also had it pretty easy compared to others who have meaning crises).
I actually answered her in text, so i can share what I wrote (translated from Hebrew). It’s mostly based on ideas from the sequences, and it was before I heard of Vervaeke (I think before these lectures even came out).
So, similarly to the quote i showed you[1] - If there’s no meaning and nothing is wrong, then there’s nothing bad in believing that there’s meaning and that there are things which are right. So you don’t need a very strong justification to make basic assumptions about morality, like (in general) “Joy is preferable to suffering” or “Life is preferable to death”. But why would you choose these assumptions (or similar)? Why not the opposite? What method can you use to arrive at this assumptions? We cannot decouple what is “moral” or “valuable” to us from our humanity. There isn’t an ultimate moral argument that will convince every intelligent being what is right and what is wrong. And we don’t have a choice but to use our brain to think about morality. It’s true that at the end of the day the reason we prefer joy and pleasure to sadness and pain, that we value love and beauty (and that these things even exist) is the result of a random process of natural selection, and not because these things have inherent value. but if we refuse to take into account what evolution is responsible for, we’ll have to refuse to even use our brain. We can’t choose to be a “Philosophy student of perfect emptiness” that supposedly comes from a completely neutral starting point to examine every argument. A student of perfect emptiness is a stone. There’s a nothing we could say to a stone that would move it. So the preferences of humans are valid arguments for what is valuable. There’s importance to the fact that if a hot iron is pressed to your body you would prefer it not to be. To the fact you you prefer a sweet apple to a soar one. That you enjoy seeing people have fun. That you suffer from seeing people suffer. You are justified in building base assumptions based on these things.
[1] It was this quote from Eric Weinstein: “Don’t be afraid to fool yourself into thinking that life is meaningful and that, against all odds, *you* have an important part to play in the world. If it’s all meaningless you‘ll have done no harm lying to yourself. And if by some chance this matters, you will waste less time.” The principle I distilled from it is that The existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth (I’ll be happy to discuss that one).
To say something is important is to make some value judgement, and it requires that things already have meaning. So if you say “There’s no meaning. Everything is meaningless”, and I ask “and why do you believe that?”, and you say “because it is true”, and I ask, “but if everything is meaningless, why is it important what the truth is?”, how do you answer without assuming some meaning? How can you justify the importance of anything, including truth, without any meaning?
So if everything is meaningless, you can believe otherwise and nothing bad would happen, even though it’s not the truth, because everything is meaningless (and thus nothing, including truth, can’t be important). If things are meaningful, you can believe they are meaningful, because it’s true. And also, if things are meaningful and you believe otherwise, that may be bad, because truth may indeed be important.
So for things to be important to you (including truth), things first have to be meaningful. Therefore the existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth, and if there’s no meaning then nothing can say you shouldn’t believe otherwise.
p.s: Verveake also said something similar: “Before you assess truth, things have to be meaningful to you”.
Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode. (“I am dry on the inside.”)
I think Vervaeke’s position is that this isn’t much of a problem. That is, the higher levels of development also contain the lower levels of development, and so can see and properly situate the having needs and being needs. If you need to eat to not be hungry, and you need to be a good parent, you might go hungry so that your child has enough to eat, or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation. If you need to not have drunk hemlock in order to live, and you need to be true to your principles, you might drink hemlock or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation.
[I’ve been reading through The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which comes up near the end of the lecture series, and the relevant part of his take on religion is that the most important bit is draining the fear of death to make possible regular life (which is everywhere colored by the presence of death). If death is actually infinitely bad, then it doesn’t make sense to get into a car, but how can you live a meaningful life without activities like getting in a car that bear some risk of death?]
But it is still a problem sometimes / you do actually have to use judgment to balance them. A friend of mine, early in the pandemic, was trying to get her community to prepare, and her community responded with something like “you seem like you’re acting out of fear in a way that seems unhealthy,” which I would now characterize as thinking my friend was “focusing on the having-need of safety” instead of “focusing on the being-need of detachment”, or something. I don’t know the full details, but as I understand it they didn’t take sufficient precautions and then COVID spread through the community. (COVID is, of course, in that weird middle zone where this might actually have been fine in retrospect, as I don’t think they had any deaths or long COVID, but I don’t think the reasons they didn’t prepare were sufficiently sensitive to how bad COVID was.)
The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures).
Anyway, your observation is good:
Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode.
This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn’t desire them (being mode).
This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it’s beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less.
It could be harmful when the having need isn’t a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn’t. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it’s difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn’t get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn’t work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable.
Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn’t need food (fact check: Can’t. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.
What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g.).
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.
(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)
This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.
Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.
* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**
** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.
Damm… That sounds terrible. Maybe that’s how it’s possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can’t imagine a game being so addicting that i don’t notice I’m hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven’t looked into it).
When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like “huh, my blood sugar is low”). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth than “I forgot to eat” or w/e.
My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don’t have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.
But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)
P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?
* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**
** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”
Episode 7: Aristotle’s World View and Erich Fromm
The agent-arena relationship is, in my view, one of the core concepts in the course. My version is that you perceive yourself as an ‘agent’, able to ‘take actions’ (often according to some script) in a way that is matched up to perceiving your environment as ‘an arena’ that ‘presents affordances’. Much of familiarizing yourself with a new place or culture or job or so on is learning how to properly understand the agent-arena relationship (“oh, when I want this done, I go over there and push those buttons”). The CFAR taste/shaping class is, I think, about deliberately seeing this happen in your mind. Importantly, basically all actions will ground their meaning in this agent-arena relationship.
One of the things that I think is behind a lot of ‘modern alienation’ is that the arenas are so narrow, detached, and voluntary, in contrast to the arenas perceived by a hunter-gatherer tribesman.
Why is ‘voluntary’ alienating? For example, suppose I’m in a soccer league; I have some role to play, and some satisfaction in how well I play that role, and so on, but at the root of the satisfaction I get from the soccer league is that I chose to participate. There’s not really ‘something bigger than me’ there; I could have decided to be in a frisbee league instead, or play Minecraft, or watch Netflix, or so on and so on. Around me are other people making their own choices, which will generally only line up with my by accident or selection effect. [“Huh, everyone at the soccer league is interested in soccer, and none of my non-league friends are into soccer.”]
The Dragon Army experiment was a study in contrasts, here; 11 people were in the house, and attendance at the mandatory events was generally 11, and attendance at voluntary events was generally 2 or 3. Even among people who had self-selected to live together, overlap in interests was only rarely precise enough that it was better to do something together than doing a more narrowly matched thing alone. But this makes it harder to build deep meaning out of a narrow voluntary arena, when it’s a nearly random choice selected from a massive list of options.
[See also the Gervais Principle, in particular the bit where the Losers value diversity because it allows everyone to be above-average in a way that is only meaningful to them. Shared meaning means conflict over a single ranking, instead of peace between many different rankings. But that’s also how you get Lotus!]
Yeah, i think you hit the nail with your point on voluntary. The thing i hear most often from people who experience a meaning crisis is “Why”—“Why this specifically? Why this and not this other thing? What’s the purpose?”. This also relates to me to Choices are Bad. If you have lots of options it’s much harder to answer this nagging “Why” question. When the possibility space is large you need much more powerful principles to locate the right choice (This also relates to relevance realization).
The process that produces that question about meaning might start out with simply trying to decide what to do, notice the option space is so large that it needs better principles to successfully locate something, then start asking questions about purpose and meaning. The distress is an inability to locate relevance.
My brother used to say that whenever someone started to talk with him about “the meaning of life” he wants to just go to them, give them a really good massage, and ask if the question still bothers them. It of course doesn’t answer or diffuse the question, but it has a point. When they’re getting a massage it’s fairly clear what the right thing to do is, try to focus on the massage and don’t worry about other stuff. It gives them peace from mind.
And I was once able to answer someone that question well enough that it seemed it actually gave her enough clarity and understanding to be peaceful and satisfied. In jargon, my answer gave her the tools to better find what’s relevant (At least if I’m not too optimistic in my interpretation of her response, she also had it pretty easy compared to others who have meaning crises).
I actually answered her in text, so i can share what I wrote (translated from Hebrew). It’s mostly based on ideas from the sequences, and it was before I heard of Vervaeke (I think before these lectures even came out).
[1] It was this quote from Eric Weinstein: “Don’t be afraid to fool yourself into thinking that life is meaningful and that, against all odds, *you* have an important part to play in the world. If it’s all meaningless you‘ll have done no harm lying to yourself. And if by some chance this matters, you will waste less time.” The principle I distilled from it is that The existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth (I’ll be happy to discuss that one).
Please. I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I’m interested.
To say something is important is to make some value judgement, and it requires that things already have meaning. So if you say “There’s no meaning. Everything is meaningless”, and I ask “and why do you believe that?”, and you say “because it is true”, and I ask, “but if everything is meaningless, why is it important what the truth is?”, how do you answer without assuming some meaning? How can you justify the importance of anything, including truth, without any meaning?
So if everything is meaningless, you can believe otherwise and nothing bad would happen, even though it’s not the truth, because everything is meaningless (and thus nothing, including truth, can’t be important). If things are meaningful, you can believe they are meaningful, because it’s true. And also, if things are meaningful and you believe otherwise, that may be bad, because truth may indeed be important.
So for things to be important to you (including truth), things first have to be meaningful. Therefore the existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth, and if there’s no meaning then nothing can say you shouldn’t believe otherwise.
p.s: Verveake also said something similar: “Before you assess truth, things have to be meaningful to you”.
Thank you, I believe I understand
Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode. (“I am dry on the inside.”)
I think Vervaeke’s position is that this isn’t much of a problem. That is, the higher levels of development also contain the lower levels of development, and so can see and properly situate the having needs and being needs. If you need to eat to not be hungry, and you need to be a good parent, you might go hungry so that your child has enough to eat, or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation. If you need to not have drunk hemlock in order to live, and you need to be true to your principles, you might drink hemlock or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation.
[I’ve been reading through The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which comes up near the end of the lecture series, and the relevant part of his take on religion is that the most important bit is draining the fear of death to make possible regular life (which is everywhere colored by the presence of death). If death is actually infinitely bad, then it doesn’t make sense to get into a car, but how can you live a meaningful life without activities like getting in a car that bear some risk of death?]
But it is still a problem sometimes / you do actually have to use judgment to balance them. A friend of mine, early in the pandemic, was trying to get her community to prepare, and her community responded with something like “you seem like you’re acting out of fear in a way that seems unhealthy,” which I would now characterize as thinking my friend was “focusing on the having-need of safety” instead of “focusing on the being-need of detachment”, or something. I don’t know the full details, but as I understand it they didn’t take sufficient precautions and then COVID spread through the community. (COVID is, of course, in that weird middle zone where this might actually have been fine in retrospect, as I don’t think they had any deaths or long COVID, but I don’t think the reasons they didn’t prepare were sufficiently sensitive to how bad COVID was.)
The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures).
Anyway, your observation is good:
This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn’t desire them (being mode).
This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it’s beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less.
It could be harmful when the having need isn’t a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn’t. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it’s difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn’t get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn’t work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable.
Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn’t need food (fact check: Can’t. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.
What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g.).
Yes, thanks for adding precision to that statement :) I only have a small familiarity with Buddhism.
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.
(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)
This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.
Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.
* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**
** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.
Damm… That sounds terrible. Maybe that’s how it’s possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can’t imagine a game being so addicting that i don’t notice I’m hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven’t looked into it).
When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like “huh, my blood sugar is low”). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth than “I forgot to eat” or w/e.
My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don’t have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.
But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)
P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?
* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**
** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”