Animals First

A little intro

You don’t have to read this part. You can just walk your way down the tabs to your left, to discover what’s on offer. But this bit gives you the context. Everything I do here comes directly out of my meandering manifesto. But let’s be honest. You’re not going to read that. So here’s a little primer.

Listen. Humans are special. It’s the most obvious thing about us. No other animal has made quite such a mark on this world. But the more time you spend studying us, the more you realise that whatever makes us special isn’t as obvious as our specialness. You know this. We are confronted with evidence of “the halt, the lame, the half-made creatures that we are” everywhere we look. If humans are so special how is it that we’re always messing it up? Why do we live ‘half awake, our fires damped, our rafts checked’? And how do we stop? How do we do better? These are the questions that btrmt. sets out to answer. And, look, you could go and work it out yourself. Or you could just adopt my solution. It’s very simple:

1. We are animals first

The more you study the brain and behaviour, the more it becomes clear that the primary role of the brain is to map the predictable structure of the world to adaptive patterns of responding. Rituals of behaviour preceded by rituals of thought. Rituals are what brains do. Everything else comes second.

2. Humans have the greatest capacity for nurture

But, of all the animals, humans have the greatest capacity for nurture. There is no creature who can come together and share ideas like we can.

3. The karstic landscape we are left with

These two things live in tension. It means, in more cases than we might care to admit, we are full of ideologies that have been produced for us, not designed by us. This is karstic: superficially pretty, but troubled by hidden sinkholes and caves. We look to others to cultivate ourselves, because this is our defining quality. But this impulse is then misdirected. Shaped by a world of animals. Power. Productivity. Status. It’s not so often we are pointed toward growth.

4. And so, btrmt.

If we accept these three things, then we can do something different. Here’s how I think that looks:

Cynosure

These three little dots represent our cynosure: our focus. You see, the way I style btrmt. is a little bit of a joke. We love betterment. The hustle. The grind. The girl-boss. Manifestation. Carpe fucking diem. Every major philosophic and spiritual tradition tells us that achievement and excellence should be at the core of what we do, and we have wholeheartedly agreed. But what we often miss is that betterment is empty without gratification and connection. No true betterment can occur without celebrating the fruits of our success and betterment is only meaningful in its reflection in the lives of others. Hence btrmt. Without the vowels. A little reminder that it’s empty when it’s all by itself. We need a balance. Betterment, in the light of our own gratification, in the arms of others. Every project I work on tries to keep these three things at the core.

Architecture

The architecture is what I use btrmt. to try and build. There’s no point trying to be better without something to make better. That’s our architecture. The instruments within and outside us that help us sustain our cynosure. To me, we can collect what’s important around six organising principles that provide just such a foundation; three within, and three without.

Inner Architecture

Within us we must maintain: our somatic architecture, our mind and body, the most basic of our tools; our thought architecture, ideas and beliefs laid down by others that we can adopt to smooth our own path; and our spiritual architecture, our tools for connecting to the meaning in the world around us.

Outer Architecture

Without, there should be: our digital architecture, our digital personhood which is as much an entity as our physical one; our collective architecture, the people with whom we share in our successes; and our wealth architecture, the basic means of life.

Somatic Architecture

A healthy mind in a healthy body

Juvenal, Satire X

We are necessarily capacity-limited by the tools we are afforded, and the most basic of these is our body. There's a reason Juvenal put this at the top of his desiderata.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned studying the brain, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this body of ours, but a close second comes by thinking about what our nervous system is all about. I have a vision for this project: ‘Neurotypica’—a guide to brain and behaviour. Right now, it’s just a collection of articles:

First, a little background on the and more on how understanding the brain helps us understand ourselves.

Then a series on the basic functions of the brain:

Neurotransmitters
Neurons
Brain Waves
Nervous System
~~Brain Structures~~
~~Brain Regions~~
~~Brain Networks~~

As I keep at it, I’ll talk a little about what these functions imply for how we should think about what the brain means for behaviour. I’ve had a sprawling go at some of these:

But I’d like to make them a bit more succinct. Then we can start to actually explain behaviour, like I have here:

Spiritual Architecture

If I find in myself desires nothing in the world can satisfy, I can only conclude that I was not made for here.

Brooke Fraser (orig. C.S. Lewis), C.S. Lewis Song

This collection is about those desires, and that dissatisfaction. Secular or godly, without tools to connect to the meaning in the world around us, we will struggle to find purpose.

Organised religion is the fastest route to find meaning in his little life of ours. Bettering oneself, for many, can only be done through spiritual maturity—an enduring connection with the sacred and the truth therein—might we discover growth, success, and gratification. The problem is, you actually have to believe this stuff to find meaning in it.

There are other routes. This project, I like to call ‘Heresies’, because you’ll need to take a little leap with me. If you’re looking to figure out how to make your life matter in the service of something greater, then you need to think about what better means. I can’t think of any moral fact about the world that doesn’t come back to a question about the biological capacity for wellbeing. The actions we take are in service of balancing what we think other things feel. And if that’s true, then we can come to an understanding of meaning with the sciences of mind. Once again, this is only a collection of articles for now, but maybe some of these will convince you that I’m onto something. Hey, it’s working for me:

First, on the value of others as something greater:

And then, how easily that can translate to something greater still:

Thought Architecture

You can't allus have things like they are in poetry. Poetry ain't what you'd call truth. There ain't enough room in the verses.

Singer's commentary, The Ballad of Sam Bass

Ideologies are poetry too. They gesture at the truth, but some truth will escape them. The idea, I guess, is to cobble together the ones that we can trust to at least point our errors in the right direction.

Ideology is this word that’s drenched in dark meaning. That’s why I use it here. Because they aren’t a bad thing, necessarily. It’d be a pain to go around having to work out everything from first principles. It’s chaos out there, and ideologies act like heuristics, or frames, through which we make some of the chaos into meaning while accepting that doing so, we’re choosing to make some meaning into chaos.

First, let me try to convince you about this ideologies thing.

Then maybe it’ll be clearer what I’m trying to do for myself with all my Analects. Each one is me trying to penetrate an ideology, to see whether it’s worth choosing. And as I learn, I add to my meandering manifesto. Which adds to this little tour I’m taking you on now. That’s my thought architecture. I hope you get something out of it.

Digital Architecture

the human mind, the last analogue device in a digital world.

Dr. Robert Ford

Our digital lives are as much an entity as our physical lives. Maybe moreso—many of us spend more time online than off. Yet we take very little care of our digital selves. And we should, because it's still not clear just how well our analogue brains can handle the digital world.

I’ve always found it kind of weird just how little attention we pay to our digital lives. We have this constant buzz in our heads that something’s off—we worry about privacy, or screen time, or the effect on our attention spans. But it never really seems like we take these concerns to their logical end. The real problem is that our digital lives are as much an entity as our physical lives. We each manage an online ‘person’, who has interactions with other online ‘people’ and services, much as we would in the physical world. Our digital lives have become much more than just an interface to our physical selves. And yet, we don’t treat these digital selves of ours very well. In fact, we don’t really treat them as anything at all. This is a problem.

First let me try to convince you why this is so important, because as animals we are as driven by the environment as we are ourselves.

And then, let me point you to my abortive first attempt at this project—Digital Selves. It gets the point across, but this isn’t really a project that’s designed for text. One day I’ll come back and jazz it up.

Collective Architecture

We don't want to be parts of stars but parts of constellations

Gloria Anzaldúa

We aren't merely animals, but social animals. And yet, the pressures of this world more often encourage us to abandon our families, both real and created, to the changing fortunes of time. We have to create ties that cannot be severed, by fortune or by whim. We have to go further than simply creating fictive kin. We have to make them real.

It’s all well and good to have connection as a central aspect of betterment. Our capacity for nurture may well be our defining characteristic. Filtering our betterment and gratification through our connection to something more does imbue what we do with meaning, and much of that can be found in our connection to others. And yet, we are lonelier than ever. So we need to take a little action to build a collective.

On Attraction and Love was my first project here at btrmt. It’s an article that wraps in a bow all the articles I’ve written about the reasons people come together, and it’s a fabulous starting place for thinking about the people you surround yourself with.

But it’s not just enough to know why and how we come together, but also why we don’t. And in True Family Ties, and What is a Cult, I point out some of the reasons why I think this is, and what needs to be done to address it.

All together, one day, this too will become something more than just articles.

Wealth Architecture

All birds can fly. All they need are wings, the right pressure, and the right angle.

The Bernoulli Principle

The concept of wealth is difficult to capture. The means of life, of living, of prosperity. The pursuit of activities and the means of pursuing those activities. An attitude and a capacity. An aim and a means to achieve that aim. Whatever it is, we'll build it.

When I talk about wealth, I don’t really mean money. Durinmg the pandemic I spent a bit of time with Hindu philosophy, and I came across the concept of Artha which, at least superficially feels the closest. It’s sort of like, the means of life and the pursuit of those means. Really, it’s almost more of an attitude. Cash is just the outcome.

So you’ll understand, then, why project is the least developed. It’s more of a philosophy. A sense that something’s wrong with the way things are. And it’s probably no surprise that I developed it during the pandemic, where all these things were emphasised dramatically. But it’s served me well enough. It’s certainly increased the number of valuable hobbies I have. And hopefully it’ll serve you too.

So, start by reading about hydraulic despotism, then read my somewhat panicked interpretation of what seemed to mean to me in From Zero.

And one day, I’ll come back as I write up the hobbies I’ve developed that make me feel much better about the whole thing (though, I suppose Digital Selves is one example of that).