Dialogues with the Devil (DwD)
How to talk to people on whom the gift of language is wasted?
When I introduced Dialogue as a Service (DaaS), I knew that not everyone would share my view of the potential and pitfalls of this Substack. At the time, I defined DaaS as human-to-human communications shielded from corrupting influences.
I realized that this definition would set a daunting standard in a world flooded with corrupting influences. Most mortals can hardly imagine a conversation without the familiar corruptions that lubricate our social interactions.
However, I reasoned that what I call "Conscious Dialogue" merely represents a horizon of possibility that we know we'll never reach. The foundation of compatibility for partners in dialogue is that they can't suppress the desire to move toward this horizon.
This movement, rather than an arrival at any predetermined milestone, represents the Promised Land — at least for people trying to protect their health from the pathocratic media ecology. To these survivors of the "attention economy", I extend an invitation to join me In Rumi's Garden by booking a complimentary session.
However, I address the rest of this post to "the others" — the people and institutions, the powers and principalities, the “rulers of the darkness of this age” — utterly uninterested in life without corruption. Instead of shielding dialogue from corrupting influences, these Agents of Pharaoh rejoice in the corruptions.
A Message to Pharaoh's Agents
In a perfect world, I wouldn't breathe the same air as you. But in our complicated world, my “dialogue” with you is one of the best ways of mending my world. So, I welcome you as subscribers and clients, and I feel deeply grateful for your unique contributions to the security of my Tabernacle.1
In the first chapter of my book, I addressed you as ‘Blind Gropers’ (BGs). Elsewhere in my writings, you served as an illustration of the banality of evil. But please don’t think that I exclude you from Rumi’s Garden of post-ideology because I hate you. Your exclusion isn’t personal, mainly because the power that brought you to me isn't human.
It often helps me to think of this power as a mind virus or parasite that causes second-order ignorance2 in the individuals and institutions it commandeers. Before I paused billing on this Substack, you accounted for more than half of my income, and I'm curious to see how this balance shifts when I restart billing on 6/15. For now, I begin this experimental dialogue by spelling out and reiterating basic presuppositions I bring to Dialogues with the Devil (DwD).
The banality of blindness makes it impossible for us to discuss in terms of reductively diagnostic or psychologizing nomenclatures. The epidemiology of second-order ignorance is fractal, characterized by the ceaseless recurrence of self-similar patterns across scales and dimensions. (See section on "Fractal Falsehood" in Diagnosis Impossible: Learning to See the Problem).
The power that connected us will never be convicted in court. It must be defeated on the battlefield. The court is part of the devil's playground. (See sections on "The Impossible Verdict" and "The Nuremberg Moment").
"Dialogues With the Devil" is obviously a misnomer. As I pointed out in my podcast on "where propaganda ceases", the very idea of dialogue becomes an absurdity when it confronts personifications of propaganda. As proud carriers of the mind virus, you are uninterested in dialogue, only in its simulations, and I now provide a form of this simulation to paying DaaS subscribers.
For the purposes of DaaS, it may help us to think of the Devil as a Hyperobject. See Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. The essential takeaway message here is that the Devil is non-local and sticky. The stickiness is one of the reasons I usually charge more for Dialogues with the Devil than I do for dilogues in Rumi's Garden.
Masks of Malevolence
Here are a few character sketches based on some of the masks of malevolence I have personally confronted:
Corporations and their enablers seeking better ways to pay lip service to sustainability.
Conspiritualists and other participants in the pandemic of meta-vampirism exploiting the collapse of institutions to sell cures deadlier than the disease.
Modern religious authorities doubling down, as recently as 2015, on the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza in July of 1656.
Rules of Engagement
A DaaS subscription isn't just another way to bill for my time, because I don't bill for my time; I bill for my attention on a risk-adjusted basis.
Email me at daas@substack.com to request a proposal. If you accept my proposal, subscribe at the proposed level.
For a fuller expression of my gratitude and other messages addressed to you, see the first chapter of my book.
As usual, “Tabernacle” refers to the use of advertising-free media to protect our epistemic order from the wilderness of the attention economy.
Ignorance of ignorance.