"Know" is a strong word. But I think at least some of us perceive the *absurd* - "Imagine Sisyphus happy". This sentiment is present in every community I've ever interacted with, from academics to politicians to plumbers. Sans suicide, what option do you have but to keep pushing the rock up the hill?
This is something we "know" that could help a lot of people around us. I have lefty friends who are caught up in the outrage about ICE and Trump, righty friends caught up in Epstein Files and Woke, academic friends caught up in the death of the university (of which Trump is a symptom not a cause), etc. Many of the older ones simply forgot about absurdity. The overwhelming majority of the young ones have never even sensed it, much less perceived or lived it. An important part of living absurdity, however, is pushing through into a skill, repetition/retrying until you can get into the Flow of some activity. You can't *feel* absurdity without Flow. So another thing "we" know is whatever skill we have hammered out enough that allows us to feel absurdity. So whether it's a knitting circle or wood turning, find and mind-meld with the others doing that. And then reach out in to the milieu and *hook* others into it ... and keep them there long enough to broach the absurd. On 7/16/25 6:56 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
What do "we" know that might be of help in remedying what I am identifying as faults in our mode(s) of "collectivism". In the spirit of part-whole conflation/emergence, *can* we, as sentient beings (maybe with the technical leverage of LLMs, etc) take a more conscious part in the collectives we are a part of? We already do it by trying to design/engineer/clamp these systems to our presumed intention, but it does seem that these "best laid plans often go awry"? What insights does complex systems science offer us to obtain another result?
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