In this post, I bring you a revised edition of my essay on Second-Order Ignorance: Learning to See the Problem. This is an 8,000-word essay about the predicament of the allegorical elephant molested by blind gropers (BGs).
To make it easier to consume such a lengthy essay, I included an audio summary — in defiance of my sore throat and congested sinuses. With my choice of media painfully restricted, I offer you only a written response to your first perfectly logical question: “Why read this essay?”
The Value Is in the Perspective
I want people to read the essay, but not mainly because of what the essay says, either about the allegory or its real-world instantiations. The claim to relevance beyond my “Audience of One” is that this essay adopts a transcontextual and autoethnographic perspective. I’m not just sprinkling fancy-sounding words into my writing. The value of the essay is in the perspective, and these are two of its most important characteristics.
Transcontextual Perspective
As I revised this essay, I thought about specific blind gropers and about the value of a perspective that examines highly polemical issues while staying above the fray of mind-warping controversies. Once the perspective descends into critiques of specific diagnostic and regulatory paradigms — not to mention individual practitioners — we lose the transcontextual view.
There’s a time and place for context-specific critiques, but in the current climate, the loss of transcontextuality often means that:
Firestorms quickly erupt
The level of noise pollution in the media spikes
People start speaking without listening using words whose meanings they assume they understand
Dialogue becomes impossible, and
Truth has no chance of being heard
Noisy media are inhospitable to truth and beauty. We can only hear truth in silence. We can only behold beauty without distractions.
The transcontextual perspective is not a way of avoiding fights. In fact, it's a way of picking fights wisely. In dealing with “fractal falsehood”, this perspective helps:
Overcome the information overload attendant on context-specific critiques, and
Formulate meta-principles applicable to specific contexts.
Autoethnographic Perspective
I’ve often described my perspective as autoethnographic, but that's not the only description. I also call it Media as Medicine (MaM) and Literature as Medicine (LaM). In my daily battles with Blind Gropers, I marvel at the therapeutic efficacy of this drug.
I am not only a provider of this drug, but also a daily user. In fact, I'm currently taking a higher dose than ever before for protection against the tyranny of second-order ignorance.
Subscribe to DaaS
You can start by reading the essay. If you feel ready for a higher dose of LaM or MaM, consider becoming a paying subscriber to Dialogue as a Service (DaaS).
At the intersection of matter and metaphor, it's important not to trip and fall. LaM and MaM are only available in dialogic formulations. Also, see the rest of my Fine Print.