James Surwillo
Aug 23, 2017 · 19 min read

Marketing Meaning

Why would a person, in a culture that does not read books, write an obscure thesis on the values of a cultural era? The simple answer is that it seemed like the most practical thing to learn about. No one has time for something that they cannot prove is worthwhile. No one wants to hear about the marketing of a complicated book, mostly because everything has to be so damn simple and for good reason. Why would we waste time on anything complicated that we cannot even prove is worthwhile? That would not make sense. The rational pathways of human thought, however, seem to eventually hit dead ends. Medieval alchemists would have recommended “In sterquilinis invenitur”, or “What you need most will be found where you least want to look”. Of course, keeping our framework organized is very important. A dive into chaos seems like the last thing we need. Keeping it simple is not just a state of mind it is a state of self-preservation. Our goal as humans seems to be to line ourselves up to make what we want to happen actualize. Something uncertain and time consuming is just an obstacle. Our ability to codify knowledge to use it in the future along with the amount of effort we put into something would seem to yield a rather predictable equation. The most valuable knowledge historically however, seems to be wisdom, which is usually beyond our rational understandings.

Jack had to steal gold from the giant after climbing the beanstalk, a tale which may have originated more than 5000 years ago. Dorothy had to collect the witches broom from her lair to return home in the tale of the Wizard of Oz, and the Goonies had to survive the booby traps of “One Eyed Willie”, a century’s dead pirate, to save their neighborhood from becoming a golf course while capturing notorious murderers. The stories of lore are all the same but are always updated to the cultural specifications of the audience. The hero has to go where they least want to go to get something of deepest value. A person who does that successfully yields the admiration of the culture. Man, that is human leadership. Going out and getting it, against all odds, for what is objectively right and just as importantly what is right to you. Human beings are social animals only productive by sharing, selling, or trading resources. If you have it in your mind that you need to do something . . . and you can get people to go along . . . mostly on their free will . . . that is a big deal. It almost seems like a superpower! Why would someone follow your lead at anything? The answer is definitely not scientific. Most leadership manuals talk about the scientific link from non-leader to leader and connect it quantitatively with future productivity. It also might be done telling a story to that point.

To me, however, that is boring and incomplete. There is a ton of useful information in both the technique and drama of leadership, but it is not the whole story. I prefer the question . . . well, why were all of these people following you to begin with? To be successful you have to had convince other people that, in some form, the resources that everyone shares, in whatever economy we choose to enter, should be disproportionately rewarded to you based on your success. You’re the winner at whatever contest you choose to try to be the best at and succeed. This is not the personality of a hyper competitive human. This is the profile of the human species. Everyone has an aim for which we have an ideal. That is called hope. If we are not hoping for better, hoping for progress, then we have lost our positive emotion, and that is not where we want to live. Maximizing positive emotion should be exactly what we would want from our youth. What are those values that seem to be shining forth as a factored value set of an entire generation of young people and where did they come from? That seems like perhaps the most practical cultural question we could ask because very soon they will inhabit leadership positions in society and shape its direction. In other words, the implications are limitless.

But we have a million things to do. Why would I need to read a book when I could read twitter and learn pragmatic facts tenfold in the same amount of time? That would seem so absurd to everyone literate, everywhere, for hundreds of years, except for us in the here and now. If we gave a literate person a choice, at any time in history to read a nourishing and thought provoking book or a series of quips from books (e.g. Crime and Punishment vs an encyclopedia), from which would they say they learned more? Well, more information would have been gained through the inundation of knowledge, but what about wisdom? Neurologists will say that there is a physiological difference in processing information while reading books. It is a deeper level of cognition. It is the level that gives us a spiritual reaction rather than a rational or emotional. That is the appeal of information hitting our long term memory because we can derive a deeper meaning. That is what shaman and priests have been searching for since the beginning of time.

We used to store and access information a little better a half millennia ago before we were “Enlightened” and much better thousands of years ago when we had only oral traditions of learning. Culture had not yet spiraled into a traumatic escalation. Really, a replacement for what Nietzsche said nearly a century and a half ago that, “God is dead”, could be instead “Wisdom is dead”, because everyone had pretty much been updating information into their long term memory at nearly the same rate up to that point. Because the pace of technology itself moved so slowly there were not huge spans of time where the individual needed a breath to reflect before they tried to keep pace with the requirements of culture. There had never been quantifiable technological changes in brief periods of time. By the 20th century it became the norm. Knowledge, for the first time in history, became more important than wisdom. It very literally placed us in accelerated cultural eras that had previously been hundreds or thousands of years in the making. Now it was happening in decades.

Mythologists and scientists both tell us that the human being has not changed or evolved significantly in the last few hundred or even the last few thousand years. Only our cultural pace, quantified most appropriately by technology itself, has become exponential. So yes, all of the Strauss and Howe theories seem to be fairly true. There are predominant values in generations, and because values of one generation shape the next we can have a reliable distribution of effects and counter effects in the next. As crazy as it gets we never really break from the traditional framework of a capitalist, democratic, Christian culture so we are bound to begin where we started at some point. Strauss and Howe, however, were single mindedly trying to prove a cultural mathematical theorem. Cultural (critical) (literary) theory is not exactly science and never can be. Of course difference in class, culture, or whatever zeitgeist in time may apply is to be expected and always will. The human experience was progressing fairly evenly up until about 100 years ago. People, with their multitude of differences, always had to navigate society in some terms, however, it was fairly predictable because outside of the ideas surrounding the American Revolution, what of any magnitude had really changed in the last 2000 years prior to the late 19th century? Scientifically we would test the argument against the accelerated pace of technology.

We now had economists who could actually count the change manifested in the material world. However, to place a value of change to the human soul is beyond the realm of economists. Anything an economist can measure is not at all what motivates us even if we could measure it satisfactorily. That is the threat to the human soul first identified by Nietzsche. Humans are the eternal knowledge seekers. Our thirst for knowledge keeps us on a journey towards progress and excellence. Pragmatically in generational epochs the detours on that journey have to have an impact on the soul. But economists please keep doing what you are doing! I did not write an anti-materialism book and it is not an anti-millennial book. It is saying that we should probably take a little time to respect the past. Many people do it in anecdotal drabs of time and place. Others like to take their history straight with only facts and figures. Maybe we should take time to think about wisdom embedded in history, and maybe a good way to do it would be a read a book that connects history to the present state of affairs. Then we should ask how that affects me as a productive leader, parent, or any other useful developmental perspective we cast on ourselves while accessing the part of the brain that taps into that sort of processing.

So, I am not saying that my book is a religious experience. I am saying that we should live like life is a religious experience, because well, it is. We certainly do not experience anything rationally. Collectively we have come to know a lot but individually we will only ever know very little. That is our limitation as a human and why the divine is particularly appealing to us. Even with godlike access to information we might even know less than we used to in some respects because humans are just limited in their capacity. What proportion of the minor and major acts that we perform each and every day are based on science? Well, they may be based on science that we had accepted earlier (not smoking for instance), which made us rationalize that belief into our cognitive framework. But even that act is no longer based on science but of our interpretation of that science. That’s how ridiculous it seems because that is closer to the truth. Scientific thinking overtook religion in humanity. Still, none of our actions have much to do with any direct science. That is just not the way humans live. There is something in our perceptions that choose to abide by that particular fact.

We are inundated with facts every day but which ones do we choose? We choose the ones where the story behind them enlightens us with the most personal meaning. Usually they are the ones that have the most use for us and that fit into our value systems and philosophical frameworks. That’s why two people can look at the same politician and literally see two different people. Of course most of the time we don’t know anything about how this process works within ourselves. The ancients were probably more acutely attuned to that mystery than we are. That could be why the phrase “know thyself” was etched into the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo in ancient Greece. We don’t know much about anything that attracts us to things and we really don’t know much about ourselves at all. We do know that we have a perspective and that incorporating it into what we do would be the best demonstration of some form of positive emotion (hope and faith simply) in our lives. The phenomenologists and existentialists have known for some time that perception, even of a material object, incorporates differences into perspectives. A simple object has different light, color, history, and meaning depending on the viewer, the circumstances of the viewer, and the time that it was considered. So although the belief in freewill seems inextricably tied to positive emotion we also seemed to have a predetermined point of view, or at least that is the way it seems to us in most situations.

If it is in fact true that objects inspire different meaning, then imagine the complexity of the variation between individuals of intangible items like ideas and stories. Extrapolating meaning from a mythological and historical perspective by someone who knows nothing about either is impossible, but it is still a human desire to do so. That’s why religion is so appealing. That’s the part that intellectual atheists rationalize and which is not nearly enough to nourish a human soul. It is kind of what we do now though. We have rationalized things so much that it is entrenched into our framework. Some accept religion as mere anecdote and some claim that the anecdote is just more knowledge about the dimensions of reality. That’s why religion has such a hold in societies whether we claim to be religious or not. It seems this quest for the great unknown is very personal. We are all caged animals looking for tools to interpret the beyond. Culture gives us a predesigned set of approximate interpretations of moral rules that best suit our culture for its time and place. That is a big head start to begin interpreting the world. That’s why culture is useful to us. It’s not something to take for granted.

That sounds like a pretty good deal. Incorporating that fiercely, historically, and piously into society may be a fairly simple task in one time period. Over time it is more difficult. So it is as almost as if religion dies as culture changes because those morals are gone? But religion does not die. Metaphysics might be a better word for religion. The metaphysical seemed to work for everyone and for all time. So just maybe there were some lives of satisfaction in all those generations that survived horror in our lineage to allow us to be born. Imagine all of the atrocities, in every life of every one of our ancestors and through all time. The tragedy of life is the only given. Pain and suffering, whether viewed objectively or subjectively, seems to be very real. We will die and so will everyone we love. If any one of our ancestors would have ceded to the winter, became prey to predator, or not had a stroke of luck in a death defying situation we would not be here. Humanity would have evolved with the embedded knowledge that the particular gene that did not keep us safe in the face of danger would be dead forever. That is the mythological representation of Mother Nature. Carrying on the practicalities of what we would otherwise forget if we did not embed them into our mental framework to act in the world is the mythological Father Culture. We must carry the codes in our genes. Evolution is still a pretty good theory.

Nature is now very little of our concern. We live in the industrialized world. Of course people still live in dire situations that cause real problems that reverberate around societal issues. We, in the western world, do not have to deal with the threat of starvation, malnutrition, sickness, extreme economic hopelessness, and genocide. That is the state of man without socialization. So, we instead form bonds of mutual benefit to get things done. Getting things done in the form of technology, however, seems to have an effect on the human psyche. That is the ancient myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and provided it to humanity. There is always a bargain for progress. For Prometheus the punishment was an eagle that continuously feasted on his liver while he was chained to a rock eternally. Simply, we trade our wisdom for more knowledge and know less about a more complex world. In 1970 Alvin Toffler called it “Future Shock”, Existentialists call it the great human crisis, and psychoanalysts might just call it anxiety, but it is bigger than that. It seems highly probable that these things have to change how we determine what is important.

Can I prove that as the pace of culture increases generational change produces values much more succinct from the last (roughly the thesis of my book)? No. Besides being boring and impossible it would be a complete waste of scientific effort. Whatever your personality you will inevitably interpret things differently based on your genetics, your personality type, experience, but also your culture. No one thing, no matter how big or small, will affect us beyond what we have control over. That is basic Stoic philosophy or a westernized form of armchair Buddhism. Stoicism believes faith in the wisdom of humanity is godlike. The Romans borrowed the ideas from the Greeks when the gods had died and Christ was not yet born. So how can I have any authority or dictate any truth in a cynical science based culture that really does not even value the perseverance, grit, contemplation, and methods that true science requires nor the faith in our traditions? It has to be a story, but the only stories we still hear are comic book characters acting out mythological representations to summer blockbusters. Still the myth lives somewhere in our being whether it be in Jung’s “collective unconscious” or Freud’s “dreams”.

Joseph Campbell, the 20th century mythologist who claimed that societal ideals grew out of hero worship, knew this would happen because it always does. We act out our representations of myth in every period. In other words, we as people, are pretty much exactly the same over time. There is no indication that evolution has any effect on culture. We need pretty much the same things always as human beings. We need to know that we can do what we need to do, whether it be a psychological, physical, or emotional task. Then we need to tell stories about what we don’t know that make sense based on our culture, our best interests, and the amalgamation of best interests for everyone we know. That is not a cognitive thought. That is hopefully an intuition learned over proper instruction throughout our life. Our positive emotions, which include hope, drive, goodwill, sacrifice, effort, perseverance, etc. will manifest in our character. That’s what Krishna and Arjuna were doing in the ancient Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. They were engaging in life. Without those actions there would assuredly be no meaning in our lives. Acting, which because of the sophistication and also the ignorance of humanity, can never be based on a scientific calculation. It should, however, deeply contemplate what our scientists deem to be scientifically true and our metaphysicists put their faith in.

My question then is can the millennial generation obtain the spirit that our highest endeavors seek? There seems to be a “generational characteristic” assigned to millennials already. We all get it. They were spoiled, coddled etc. They spend all of their spare time using technology. Well, all that might not be completely healthy but let’s figure out how to make it better. The bottom line is that these people will be our leaders soon. How about we help them out in the meantime instead of pointing to their deficiencies without constructive interjection? They were probably not introduced to a lot of what we think is important, but their value system is much deeper than we give them credit. The young could choose not to go to college even though it still seems to be the best way to have a bright future. The Promethean bargain, in this sense is that we now have a generation saddled in debt to take that journey. In the United States not even the clean slate of bankruptcy cleanses the sins of record high student loan debt. We have made our young indentured servants using questionable curriculum. Only the elite went to college 100 years ago. Now it is an absolute must unless you start a business, which requires capital, or start at a very low place that may stigmatize you as an underachiever. A recent study found that how much money you make the first ten years of your career is a pretty good indicator of your lifetime earnings. Trades may be a godsend but only in places that require them (like big cities). So the result has been to finance your dreams, live in poverty for a dream that may never be a reality, live in a hell of instability and despair, just or never grow up.

If you do not have a good idea, the tenacity, and the support system to build something on your own, you most likely need some form of education. Hopefully this stamp of curriculum completion called a degree allowed you to exercise some form social, political, and emotional intelligence other than regurgitate raw facts. It may and should even give you important ideas that you can incorporate into other areas of your life. Ideally you learned to make arguments that give credence to your impact. So not only did you learn something but you can apply it and articulate what you have applied for others to learn. Going through this process is an examination in leadership. It just does not seem useful to tell just one story about leadership. The meta-story of leadership is way more fascinating and useful. That is the story that explains the stories. It only seems appropriate to begin in our current historical era.

What makes people grasp the ideals of whatever type of leadership we are espousing? There will never be a science that incorporates that answer. We have to believe there is some truth and ideal to our way of being and I don’t see how it is not locked within our limited cultural perspective. So we have no choice but to view the world through the metamodern lens. How do you explain the metaphysics of the post-postmodern (metamodern)? It seems like such a real and yet such an arbitrary and erudite form of cultural reconstruction. It is definitely not postmodern deconstruction which stripped the cupboards bare of historical principles. It is the reconstruction to rebuild those historical principles. When someone today speaks of culture (most likely baby boomers), they speak to the only culture they know, which is the very same culture that revolted all tradition. Nothing in recent memory had ever happened as explicitly to culture as the 1960’s Cultural Revolution. The postmodern period beginning then, revolted against all tradition hundreds of years in the making. It literally attacked the Enlightenment principles won of tradition.

It was rebellion of everything in the past. In just two generations we have decided to cast off the truth won over thousands of years. People who study this kind of thing determined that by about the year 2000 the postmodern had ended but its legacy lives on. To use the terms of the postmodern, the power structure (meaning the last 400 years of culture or so) had to be destroyed. Those were the baby boomers who fought that battle and not the millennials. This is the same generation who has captured the narrative regarding the decrepit morals and values of youth. Postmodernism was interested in “power structures”. The hierarchy of the Enlightenment needed to give way to the vast and unseen relationships in culture. That is a noble idea if it were to be embedded in culture. The problem, however, came from the social sciences which were making pretty good cases that systemic inequality supplanted the dead idea of Marxism. The truly religious found that it impacted our American mythos. The biggest problem was that it distorted the mindset of two generations. Not only was everyone now historically narcissistic but we had to contend with new waves of nihilism, cynicism, and ideology. The other equally true story was that new and glaring inequalities were begging for some forms of justice.

Lines were drawn with new forms of cultural disruption. People have to tell new stories that fit into the old way of being. Too much disconnect spirals into chaos. It is no wonder the modern conservative movement coincided with the 1960’s Cultural Revolution. Maybe, just maybe, the new stories don’t align with the old because (1) technology now causes things to change fast but (2) the postmodernism sent humanity on a detour. Are we, or at least do we have the opportunity of being on the road to humanity connecting back to the chain of wisdom broken by the postmodern? A synthesis of knowledge is required to appropriately contemplate this potential state. It has been many things to people across time. What positive psychologists, artists, shamans, priests, and really everyone with some inclination towards the future would assume is that we need to go after meaning with responsibility to something and someone.

What does that have to do with leadership? It means don’t go out looking for a leadership as a skill. Leadership is a way of being and it does not have to encompass anybody but you. It also means use history, however it can be used to guide you to create the best outcome that can potentially determine the most meaning in your life. I’ve never had that experience from a person offering leadership anecdotes and quotes. I’d like to think it is because I am not a puppet and what happened in the past and to other people might influence me but will not ultimately offer me an exact blueprint. The depth psychology of Freud, Jung, and Rogers could explain it much better than I could. Every day we are quite literally marketed bullshit that precisely confirms our pre-conceived notions and then search for items presented in the ways that are most palatable for us as individuals to consume . . . until we become ideologues assured of our own intellectual dominance. That is the godlike psychographic power of the internet. It could be argued that in certain cases the Big Data algorithms collected on the internet know your actions before you do. If so we have lost our capacity for critical thinking given to us by our own freewill.

Ideology might be how we live now but it is what the Enlightenment was against. Nietzsche oversaw the supreme revolution of reason began by Descartes. He knew that the delicate balance of culture relied on hundreds of years of tradition. Five hundred years ago we did not base anything on science because we did not have the scientific method. The scientific revolution meant people could industrialize quickly. The speed and productivity caused great waves of human suffering to cease. There was a direction and it was straight ahead predictably and hopefully. So, in a sense, my book marketing strategy is not succinct because my answering the question about what my book is about requires that much time to explain. All the simple stories have been told. There is no, quick science lesson, hacky meme, thought leader guru, get rich quick scheme, business leader, hero, or politician that can make the sole difference in our lives from afar. Religion can do the trick but we would need time to meld doctrine with our personhood lest we become dogmatic slaves. Where do you look then, in a society with dissenting voices and stories that people really just began telling each other recently?

Humans have been well-civilized for just about 10,000 years. How is it that we live without thinking of all of their hard lessons won every day? The stories we are telling now seem outrageous against the backdrop of history. The stories recently being told are all wrapped in a very short span of time. The oddest thing to me is that people live well within their time. It seems to me that it would be better to live throughout as much of history as possible every day. It just seems wiser. The postmodern is the one and only frame of reference of our modern culture. It began in the 1960’s and 1970’s and its curators have grown up and assumed positions of power in all aspects of society. The values of those generations are still very much alive and thriving in culture. What we fail to realize is that narcissism and ideology high jacked our great traditions. We chastise the young for not conforming to this unnatural state. How do we unravel the mess? What is the connection to the values of our future leaders to long held cultural values? It is not an easy question much less an easy answer. That’s why I spent the last half decade consumed by it and that’s why I wrote a book about it instead of a tweet.

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James Surwillo

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Leadership, Ancient Wisdom, and the Metamodern World. Jamessurwillo.com