Questions I am sitting with

What this series of work is for

This is where I am thinking in public. Where I am asking myself questions, pondering the answers, then publishing that thinking. It’s a mixture of philosophy, journal, credo, and blog.

Why publicly? Why questions? I don’t believe that a person’s views and beliefs should be held as fixed. By publishing the questions, and my thinking, rather than my conclusions held as facts, I am inviting disagreement, and leaving my position open and reversible. It turns out this is also structural to what will follow.

What I want back: objections, and people saying “that one is wrong because …”. Not agreement.

Where are we starting from?

For about a year I have been building a philosophy in a notebook (and my head … I sometimes forget to write). It is called Symmetric Sovereignty. The core of it is one claim: that health (in a person, a company, an economy, a country) is not found in resolving opposing forces but in consciously holding them.

I am not going to argue that here. That is not the purpose. I want to do something more useful, which is to put the questions I cannot answer in public, while they are still open, whilst I still think about them.

There are two core groups of questions. But before we get to them, let me lay some groundwork.

I utilise a polarising structure in the values/principles of the work where each value holds a shadow of itself e.g. strength without cruelty.
I start from a position within business where I am attacking the VC/PE funding models, where businesses become driven by the needs of the fund that capitalise them, not the purpose for which the business was created. I believe it to be, in its current form, an asymmetry in tension.
Exit, in regard to the philosophy, is not an exit event from funding, but the ability to leave a situation, circumstance, or outcome. The exit event from funding models is one example of one type of exit.

The first kind are questions I have asked and not yet answered.

Does the framework fail in one way or two?

Every value in it takes the form “X without Y”. Strength without cruelty, agency without domination. But strength does not gradually become cruelty … it flips, the moment it stops serving anyone but itself. Whereas optimisation slides into suppression by degrees, and there is no moment where it turned. Those are two different physics that are normalising behind one grammar (I appreciate my own irony here).

When did this stop being about me?

All this work started as a personal creed. An attempt to help me understand myself and how to help my children adopt values I perceived to be the right ones for them to lead a happy life. Somewhere in the notebook there is a margin note where I caught myself writing “my position” and wrote a note: This is no longer just about me. That was a note about phrasing. It was not about phrasing. And I still do not know whether becoming something offered to other people changes only how I say it or what I am entitled to claim.

Is my critique of venture capital aimed at the right thing?

I think the model for modern business is broken. But venture capital is also the only capital structure that has historically and reliably funded things almost certain to fail … it selected for weird (or at least it used to). And the institutions I hold up as counter-examples do not support me cleanly: Bell Labs ran on monopoly rent, and wartime American science ran on state funding. Neither is a bootstrapping story. There are other stories, but they don’t demonstrate the impact of the tension that the philosophy is built on as well either.

What does it mean that I am building this with a machine?

*Beep Boop* Slop detected … more irony incoming (not to mention what now feels like an over-relied-on cliché). In the front of the notebook I copied a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune: once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Then by two pages later, I had started using one (oh the shame, don’t judge me). I have battled this tension and irony, but my position stands at the moment that sovereignty over your thinking means retaining authorship, not doing all the thinking alone. I am aware that is a convenient position for me to hold, which is why I have not yet considered this answered, especially as I am still uncomfortable with this position myself.

The second kind are the ones I have not properly asked yet.

These are less respectable. They are closer to an itch than a question.

My position on this has already shifted

I had written this first draft, and within a few days of pondering and back and forth with my mate Claude, I have arrived at a slightly different understanding of exit. I felt it to be load-bearing as I kept returning to it, but that was because it was clean and easy. It’s simply a portable instrument that requires nobody’s agreement to enact. Fixing asymmetry in the tension by nature keeps an exit open, but having an exit does not fix asymmetry.

How do you publish a position and still be able to change your mind?

Exit is load-bearing in this philosophy. I think most exercises of power are only legitimate if the other party can leave. But publishing closes an exit on yourself. Once you have said a thing in public, defending it starts to feel like integrity, but defending it can easily lead you into a trap of closing doors on ideas, people, and information out of ease.

Is holding tension something everyone can do?

It was put to me recently that the ability to hold two contradictory true things without collapsing them is not a skill but a temperament, and that a lot of people genuinely cannot do it. If that is right, then I have not written a philosophy. I have written a description of how to live well if you happen to be built the way I am built. I do not know yet whether I believe it, or how I will know if it is true or not, so it stays open.

What do I owe the people who improve this?

Someone will tell me something that changes it, someone will do something that changes my views. There will be countless deliberate and accidental moments and interactions in my life that will alter my perceptions and views. Then that will appear in my works, with my name on it, despite me not being the origin of it. It’s likely I may not ever be able to identify or name those people. So what do I owe them and how can I honour that?

I will keep publishing these as they change, including the ones that turn out to be badly asked, or entirely misunderstood. If one of them is obviously wrong to you, let me know it now, knowing now helps me more than finding out after I have built another year on top of it. You can contact me via the details on the contact page of my website, or by opening an issue on GitHub against the public repo for this project.