Belonging Again II.1 (Book 1, Chapter III, Section 2B)

We Must Unplan Our Lives

Photo by John Fowler

To avoid Affliction, we see a need for us to be subjects who can handle, give Attention to, and face “lack,” that which we must then “Absolutely Choose” to be apophatic or mere nothing (which will eventually bring us to the work of Stanley Rosen). But we cannot plan for “lack,” only be prepared for it, and this is for me to be “different kinds of subjects” then the kinds of subjects who we have been for most of history. This is for us “to move from the neurotypical to the neurodiverse,” per se, which is for us to move from A/A to A/B, Discourse to Rhetoric — it is for us to become Children. If much now rides on us figuring out how to spread the conditions in which people “leave Plato’s Cave on their own,” then what this means is we must move from a socioeconomic system focused on “planning” to one which is “prepared.” This is for us to take Ivan Illich seriously (as we will discuss), and it is for us to become Antifragile and “intrinsically motivated.”

November 2023, Michelle and I had the pleasure of teaching a course at Parallax titled “Look at the Birds of the Air,” which entertained a distinction between “planned” and “prepared.” The class claimed we needed to “unplan our lives,” which sounds strange, admittedly, but the notion is that we today are very dependent on plans and planning, and though that emphasis was perhaps acceptable for most of human history (until now, 2023), given the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the collapse of “givens,” the growth of complexity, Pluralism, and the like, we must begin to shift our focus to being “prepared for the unpredictable.” Again, following Hegel, this doesn’t mean we were wrong to focus on planning like we did, but that we are now reaching an end to that “historic episode” and need to “negate/sublate” it into a period where “being prepared” is more primary. We will of course still make plans and require them, but these plans will emerge out of a state of preparation versus us live as if “planning” and “preparing” are similes (as we’ve been able to do for most of history without great trouble). But things are shifting, and that shift would have us become more like Ivan Illich envisioned (which would furthermore have us align more with Rhetoric than Discourse).

What’s the difference between “plan” and “prepare?” To plan for something is to create a “map” and “model” by which to organize our action toward it; it is predictive and modellable. For example, I might plan to visit the beach next year and buy some tickets, make some reservations, etc. — everything is “mapped out,” and I then know where I will be next year around June. It’s predictable. “Being prepared” however is where I don’t know what’s going to happen in June, but regardless I’m ready for it. If it’s hot, I’ve trained myself not to be addicted to air-conditioning; if food is short, I know how to grow my own garden; if everyone around me is going through hardship, I know how to “deescalate drama” and be there as a friend. I’m prepared. Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with planning for a trip in June if in making plans I don’t get in a habit of using my time in a manner that makes me less prepared. This is key: planning must never replace preparing, but there is something about planning (in being linear, predictable, and “low order”) that often overreaches over preparing (dynamic, unpredictable, and “high order”), which trains us out of it. After all, why do we need to be prepared if we have everything planned out? If we plan well, nothing bad will happen…

It is natural to think of ourselves as prepared, not just dependent on plans, but that often just means that we “plan to be flexible” (and perhaps yet never are) when our plans fail. To be prepared means to be able to handle the unexpected, which for Ivan Illich is more about skills and discernment, while being “flexible” often means “we adjust plans.” To “be prepared to change plans” is not what Illich is talking about, but this is a way by which we can hide from ourselves our lack of preparation. Furthermore, if we are “disabled by the system,” we can’t be prepared (or even really flexible), despite what we might think about ourselves. Preparation is deeper than flexibility, but identifying this difference is not something the system makes easy to do.

Another factor which might contribute to the mistake of “planning at the expense of preparing” is the association of the “quantifiable” with “more real,” which is to say that a plan is more quantifiable than preparation, and hence can come to be seen as more real, while “preparing for something” can be seen as irrational, paranoid, and “unreal.” This topic will be expanded on when we discuss The Right to Useful Unemployment by Illich, but the point is that if we can’t make money doing it or show our plan for it, it’s often seen as fake, unreal, flaky, and unreliable. The society doesn’t tend to care “what we’re prepared for,” only what “we’ve planned for,” and, to its defense, there’s a good reason society is like this: for decades and even centuries, society has been able to conflate “plan” and “prepare” without must consequence. But times have changed and will continue to change as complexity intensifies and the future becomes more foreign and alien. Increasingly, all we might be able to do is prepare for the future, not so much plan for it (if we plan for it, we’ll likely plan to be wrong). Unfortunately, plans can bring with them a kind of “Stockholm Syndrome” where we refuse to acknowledge they were wrong (nobody wants to be wrong, after all), and so we might keep trying to make them work, then try again, again…Making little progress in the name of progress.

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb is a book about preparation over planning, and a way to think about the distinction is the idea that we can’t plan for when a rock is going to hit a window: it could happen today, tomorrow, a year from now, or never. However, we can design the window so that it can withstand being hit by a rock, regardless when that might happen, and this would be for us to prepare the window. Similarly, we can’t plan for what occurs as we approach the “Technological Singularity” (as Cadell discusses, Ep #60), but we can work to be prepared for it — but doing so will require us to work ourselves out of habits we’ve been trained into by school, the economy, and “the system” in general. Illich spoke of “unquestioned assumptions” and examined history to show the assumptions we absorbed and lived according to without realizing it, and one of those “unquestioned assumptions” today is “we must plan our lives.” It’s inevitable we plan, and plans are not inherently bad, but after years of being habituated by the system (Discourse), it’s far more likely we need to unplan our lives in order to bring it into a proper dialectic with preparation (thus benefiting Rhetoric). At this point in history, it’s more likely we plan to be “dragged from Plato’s Cave,” but now something unexpected could occur, mainly that nobody comes. And so we might wait for our plan to come to fruition for a very long time…

Cadell Last has made the point that the dream of “The Scientific Universe” seen in thinkers like Newtown was that we would be able to “predict the universe” (like a fine-tuned clock), and to the degree an idea was predictable was to the degree it was “scientific” and hence “most actual.” But we have found that as we move from Physics to Chemistry to Biology to Mind…that the world becomes more unpredictable, which is to say unpredictability rises with complexity. Human subjects are extremely complex and unpredictable, and yet if we still associate “predictability” with “most actual,” that means we associate “most real” with that which is less human. To focus on planning and predictability then is to thus make humans “toward” life in a devolving and disabling way, and yet it is those who are “toward” life as such who can be considered most practical and “actual.” In the name of being ready for the future then, we can make ourselves less able to enter the future as human beings.

I have critiqued “Bestow Centrism” with Nietzsche, and we could say that plans can “bestow on us direction,” which is what we must now move beyond (via negation/sublation). “Bestowing” is inevitable in life, as is planning, but the trick is that we don’t engage in “Bestow Centrism” or “Plan Centrism” as a superior or moral way of life. This is when we can dehumanize and disable ourselves, a fate we can avoid by prioritizing preparation, but engaging in preparation can be seen by others as irrational, impractical, and silly. If engaging in preparation though is what is required for people to be Children, this would suggest that the majority of people won’t be, and if much rides on the “spreading of Childhood,” then this is a problem. The macro-conditions will have to change, but how can that occur without us engaging in force and totalitarianism as arguably does Plato in The Republic? Not easily, but what’s impossible today might be such due to changeable conditions.

Preparation is “shadow work” today (a concept which will be expanded on later in this book), and for Illich “shadow work” is that work left in the shadows by wage labor which is not even acknowledged as work (the only real work is that which receives a wage, even if the “shadow work” is what makes wage labor possible). There are strong social incentives and pressures not to engage in “shadow work,” but if that is precisely the work we must do to be prepared (and we really must be prepared to handle the future of “The Technological Singularity”), then that means there is social incentive to end up effaced and impoverished (financially and spiritually). This is a massive problem, and quickly we need to cease incentivizing planning over preparation (Discourse over Rhetoric, A/A over A/B). It’s another topic, but I think the moralization of plans is contributing to people not entering into marriage or having children (as the Collins discuss at Based Camp), precisely because people can’t plan for the future, which makes them feel too anxious and inadequate to try to plan a life (as seems possible because of birth control). Furthermore, if a society moralizes “having a plan,” then it basically becomes “immoral” to let those without plans get married or reproduce, but as the world changes and a plan becomes increasingly useless, the anxiety of the situation might incentivize people to stress the need for plans more, creating a vicious-cycle in which birthrates might plummet as isolation climbs.

In response to my conversation with Cadell Last and Andrew Sweeny on Ivan Illich, “Owen in the Agon” (also known as Raymond K. Hessel) made the excellent point that as planning collapses, what also breaks down is the social contract, which makes the situation politically consequential and volatile. If we cannot plan on retirement, social security, a job — what good then is society? Why should I pay taxes? Why should I bother to work? If the society leaves us “disabled” and then also makes us feel like it has broken its promises, the people will easily grow enraged and rebel against the ruling class. What then? Will the ruling class flee or squash the rebellion? It’s hard to say, but Owen’s insight suggests why the transition from a “planned society” to a “prepared society” will be difficult (a transition which probably can’t be planned for itself). This too is something for which we need to be prepared.

If all we know how to do is plan, if our plans fail, all we can do is make a new plan, then a new one…But why would we even bother trying if the first plan failed? We might find ourselves having to overcome a trauma and anxiety to create a new plan, which, given rising complexity, is likely to fail again. And so, on and on, we might fall deeper into a cycle that causes us despair, only able to respond to that despair with that which makes it worse. The only hope is for us to do something different, to “prepare” versus “plan,” but after years of “planning” and habituating ourselves to what is typical (A/A), this is hard and unnatural. In this way, we can see how we might associate “planning” with “neurotypical” and “preparation” with “neurodivergence,” and as we need something like neurodivergence to leave the “Game Theory Problem” and “Rational Impasse” of Plato’s Cave, so we need neurodivergence to move beyond “planning” into “preparation.”

To plan is more neurotypical, given how history has allowed planning to work for so long; to prepare is now more neurodivergent. We must “unplan our lives” to the degree we are dependent on plans and they remove from us the incentive to perfect and master practices of preparation. Where there is preparation, there can be plans, but plans often replace preparation where they come first (as Discourse can follow Rhetoric but doesn’t tend to occur the other way around). We have been able for decades to “plan away the Real” of Lacan, but now we must instead be “prepared for the Real” — we cannot keep planning it away. Artificial Intelligence will easily replace most “wage labor,” and anything we as humans can plan for, AI will probably plan for better. We must prove prepared for what AI cannot do, which will orbit “lack,” the “nihilism” described by Rosen, and the “apophatic,” which is to say we must be ready to organize ourselves like “Hip-Hop Cyphers capable of magic” (to say something vague which I spoke to Sweeny about, Ep #138, and also Thomas Winn, Ep #93). This is our challenge, but, if we rise to it, AI might also prove a blessing.

Funny enough, what might prove our biggest threat is precisely what AI cannot do that we cannot predict, precisely because AI will have easily trained us out of habits of being prepared in being so long habituated to AI solving all our problems. In this way, it might not be AI that directly proves our undoing, but the reality that AI has undone our humanity and made us unprepared for what AI cannot do which we cannot predict. And what is it that AI won’t do? Well, AI cannot for one actually give us a final “Singularity” that we may be seeking, for we might be subconsciously seeking to “overcome lack,” which might be a problematic dream to “return to the womb” or “return to Eden.” This is the self-effacing dream which we seem bound by Affliction “toward,” and it is a dream that rationality seems incapable of saving us from (stuck in a Nash Equilibrium); in fact, all rationality seems to be in the business of is accelerating us deeper into the mistake. What we need is mentidivergence and Childhood, for this would enable us to think what rationality would never have us think: the difference between “Technological Singularity” (A/A) and “Technological Harmony” (A/B).

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