Episode #174 - Transcript

So in one of her earlier journals Simone Weil writes about a moral dilemma that ENDS UP being a METAPHOR, for a situation that a lot of people might FIND themselves in while LIVING in the modern world. She says to imagine a man…who lives in a society…where he is forced to solve complex math problems all day long…but the CATCH is that WHEN he SOLVES one of these math problems…ANY TIME he arrives at an answer, and that ANSWER is an EVEN number…he gets beaten with a STICK…by the powers that be. They tell em we don’t take too KINDLY to EVEN NUMBERS round here son. Now go on…SOLVE another one of them math problems, as he twirls the stick smiling with his dirty hands. 

The moral DILEMMA for Simone Weil was this: what should the mathematician DO when he FINDS himself in this situation? Should he resist and fight back? Should he just refuse to solve any more of their math problems? Should he make a sign and PROTEST about how UPSET he isr? By the end of these two episodes released here today we’ll understand WHY Simone Weil came up with the particular solution that she DID to this moral dilemma…and also why as the years went on…she grew in her thinking enough to realize that the answer…. might not be as simple as the one she originally came up with. 

For now though, it’s interesting to consider WHY she thought this man’s situation was a METAPHOR for living in modern society. To be someone LIKE this man… who’s solving MATH problems…is to be someone who’s at bottom, on a quest to find… the TRUTH. Meaning, you’re NOT interested in someone’s OPINION about what the correct answer is to a math problem. You’re NOT interested in one particular political ideology’s TAKE on what the correct answer is. You’re looking for the TRUTH, on a DEEPER, more IMPERSONAL, more UNIVERSAL LEVEL…. when you’re doing something like a MATH problem. 

Well as we’ve talked about on the last couple episodes: this new kind of attention that Simone Weil is going to call for…is ALSO seeking the truth on a more universal level. 

Remember the whole strategy is to SUSPEND the PARTICULARS… you’re SUSPENDING your own personal projects, privileges, biases, personality, you’re suspending your ego…and you’re DOING this to HOPEFULLY try to better connect… with both PEOPLE on THEIR own terms… and the UNIVERSE on ITS own terms…and if you think about it… to ENGAGE in THAT sort of attention, is to live a life SIMILAR to this mathematician in the thought experiment. 

But then IMAGINE… if LIKE the mathematician who gets BEATEN for coming up with an answer that’s an EVEN number…imagine if HALF the time you actually SOUGHT the truth about the world you’re living in…imagine if you paid an IMMEDIATE social PRICE for DOING that. 

Now what could Simone Weil POSSIBLY be referencing when she ALLUDES to all this? 

Well there’s a TON of examples. We’ve already REPEATEDLY talked about one of them on this series. Factory workers, soldiers, or anyone working at a job where your ability to THINK… has to GO… for you to be able to MEET whatever the work quota is.

Where just as an act of SELF PRESERVATION…you CAN’T THINK about higher level ethical concerns…the fact that your dignity or health has to be sacrificed so that you can BETTER serve as a means to some OTHER person’s economic or political ends. 

Again, you start COMPLAINING about something like that at a JOB like this and the thinking is: look, this is just WHAT the job is…you don’t like it…go find another JOB. To Simone Weil…giving up your ability to THINK…is ONE EXAMPLE of a social COST that some people have to PAY, just like the mathematician…if you were OTHERWISE the kind of person that was committed to seeking the TRUTH.  

But there’s many OTHER examples of this social cost for seeking truth…For one… as we talked about before… you gotta give up the TRUTH… as your #1 priority at least for the FIRST part of your life while you’re in school. This is AGAIN just an act of SELF PRESERVATION GIVEN the way that we’ve decided to TEACH the children in our societies. 

Where you go to class everyday and you’re told that what you’re SEEKING when you’re trying to LEARN about the world…is the SINGLE, CORRECT answer to the questions that are given to you. That there’s a MILLION ways to be wrong about the world…and a SINGLE way to be correct. And again if you’re ever CONFUSED about something in life…just go out and do some research…you research LONG enough and you’ll eventually arrive at the right answer.

Point is…school is more about finding ANSWERS sometimes than about finding the truth…and if you’re in school and you don’t WILLFULLY go along with THAT set of objectives when it comes to measuring how much you’ve learned this week…you’re probably not gonna do very well in school…that’s a COST that you potentially have to pay for seeking the truth as well. 

Simone Weil would say COUPLE that with the fact that once you’re OUT of school and you BECOME an adult…there are very REAL incentives for JOINING some collective way of thinking, where everybody agrees they’re gonna THINK about the world in the exact same way.

Picture a political party…picture a religion. Picture how GOOD it feels psychologically to have any TEAM that you’re a part of and to HAVE all the ANSWERS figured out. Now picture the fact that people out there… in their OWN naive attempt to make sense of the world…just LOVE to group EVERYONE around them IN  to these collectives. You, over there, you must be progressive…I can SMELL it. And YOU. You’re a conservative, aren’t you? Don’t lie to me.

People don't really like it too much…if someone doesn’t fit NEATLY into one of these categories…they start to get weirded out, they think something’s… wrong with you. Like if they think you’re ONE thing and then you start ENTERTAINING ideas on the other side of things…they may think you’re just STUPID…like you just don’t have solid OPINIONS on things. Or that you’re some sort of CHAMELEON that changes based on who you’re talking to. Or one of my favorites that this is just some sort of ACT you’re putting on…that this is a FALSE OPENNESS to ideas that’s REALLY just an elaborate tactic where you’re trying to AVOID criticism and make it so that no one can possibly DISAGREE with you. 

It’s off putting for a lot of people out there to not have some sort of clear ideological foundation for WHO a person is and EVERYTHING they represent…that they can then either RAIL against or be endlessly charitable to.  

And for someone like Simone Weil…where her life is often DESCRIBED in terms of the huge amount of CHANGE that occurred in her thinking in such a relatively short period of time…that level of GROWTH in her thinking is ONLY available if you’re somebody that ORIENTS your attention in this more open, receptive way that she talks about… where you’re trying to get to something DEEPER than just ASSUMING what everyone else around you ASSUMES about how the world is, and that’s GREAT and all! 

But Simone Weil would say the FLIP side of that is that WHEN you ORIENT yourself in this way, you sometimes LIVE in a place of social alienation… you’re often misunderstood… it’s often harder to find in-groups of other people to feel connected to, THAT is a SOCIAL cost you pay for actually seeking the truth as well. 

But there’s even MORE costs that you pay to be like the mathematician. One OBVIOUS one is that you pay a cost, for not being aligned with whatever the DOMINANT DISCOURSE of the DAY is. Maybe you’re TERRIFIED of even speaking out, think you may lose your job. 

You pay a cost…Simone Weil says at one point, when it comes down to it… for NOT making the SAME mistake that SO MANY generations of people have made over the course of human history…you pay a cost for NOT thinking, that you’re the center of the universe. Where the PARTICULAR political climate that YOU happen to exist in…you make the assumption that’s just tantamount to what being a PERSON is, and MAGICALLY I found this GROUP I’m subscribed to that has the SOLUTION to the problems of the human condition. 

But despite all these costs that the seeker of truth, and the mathematician have to pay in the modern world…there’s STILL, just a certain number of people that can’t SHAKE this glaring SUSPICION that they have…that there SEEMS to be something DEEPER to access about reality that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the PARTICULARS of your life or personality. Could there be a way to orient yourself TOWARDS this deeper reality, where we are NOT the center of the universe… almost like Copernicus's revolution, but in the field of ethics. 

CONSIDER the fact she writes at one point…that we have TONS of civil regulatory agencies that deal with protecting people’s PARTICULAR human rights, their PARTICULAR democratic freedoms. But there isn’t even a public SERVICE announcement from our governments, not a SINGLE WORD SPOKEN… about the IMPORTANCE of the UNIVERSAL obligation we have to other human beings, that’s the FOUNDATION of those rights and freedoms. 

We do next to NOTHING in our societies to promote the moral DEVELOPMENT of people…no, again we just gather together, we ORGANIZE these MORAL SEMINARS…and we pat ourselves on the back feeling satisfied writing people’s HUMAN RIGHTS down on a piece of paper giving people this legal and commercial language, for certain LINES that they better not cross… or else THAT’S gonna be a violation of the RULES…naughty naughty…you’ve been a NAUGHTY BOY today…that’s breaking the RULES violating that person’s human rights… not you, you know, violating someone’s very personhood, part of what makes them HUMAN, like we talked about last time. Couldn’t be that.   

But it’s MISSING the point: as Simone Weil says… a man living ALONE in the universe would have NO RIGHTS to speak of…but would STILL absolutely, have obligations. 

What does it say about our societies that we do NOTHING to promote people’s UNDERSTANDING of that obligation? That we do NOTHING to aid our citizens to see the DEEPER connection available on a human to human level, rather than just how USEFUL someone is to you…or how you’re politically or economically TIED to another person in a way that HELPS you? What does it say that THIS is the way we ENCOURAGE most people to LOOK at their fellow human beings?

What it says among other things to Simone Weil is that we NURTURE ideology and closed mindedness. We create an INCENTIVE in our societies for people to JOIN a collective way of thinking, and then structure things in a way that spiritually CRIPPLES them… so that they feel like they have no choice BUT to join one of these collectives. Now WHY would anybody… want to DO this to people?

This goes back to this concept of FORCE that we talked about on the first episode. Remember gravity is to the movement of PHYSICAL objects…as FORCE is to the movement of human events. The goal of people IN positions of power… who are PRODUCTS of this whole setup where we NURTURE ideology… is to turn PEOPLE… from ends in themselves…into just a MEANS to some END that some person in POWER has. They INCENTIVIZE collective thought, because people are MUCH easier to control politically when they are all THINKING the same way. And they’re even EASIER to control as a means to an end when you can dominate the media outlets that tell them what to think next. 

You ever known somebody and some big story happens in the news…and they’re not by their phone and they have almost NOTHING to say about it at first…but you give them 10 minutes to READ their personal little curation of websites that tell them how to think…and all of a sudden they got all KINDS of opinions about it? This is NOT someone that’s seeking the truth to Simone Weil…and the THING IS…they’re living in a society that’s working AGAINST them seeking the truth to begin with. 

We have a LONG HISTORY she thinks where people have been moving further and further away from our #1 priority being to actually UNDERSTAND reality, INSTEAD of just some theoretical abstraction that only exists on paper. She thinks if you look back at history you can see this trend emerging almost EVERYWHERE, but one UNEXPECTED place she thinks had a large contribution to this trend, comes down to the way we MODEL things mathematically. 

I could probably talk about this for an entire EPISODE so I’ll try to keep it short…but there’s some VERY interesting sections in the journals of Simone Weil as WELL as in certain letters that she wrote to her BROTHER, where she TALKS about how the exact method we use to try to mathematically understand reality…drastically CHANGES not only the way we see reality, but the way we see the concept of UNDERSTANDING something at all. What does it mean to have an UNDERSTANDING of something? 

She thinks there was a SHIFT a couple hundred years ago from geometric expression to algebraic expression, and again, this is the SHORT version of this… but back in ancient athens…Plato famously wrote over the doorway that was the ENTRANCE to the academy “let no one ignorant of geometry enter here”. That’s the usual TRANSLATION that you’re given as someone that’s trying to learn about philosophy on the internet. But there was an ALTERNATIVE translation to that…and Simone weil thought this DIFFERENT translation was FAR more accurate and represented WHY Plato would write that over a DOORWAY a lot more…the ALTERNATIVE translation was “let no one enter here who is NOT a geometer.” 

Simone Weil thought the point Plato was trying to make… was NOT that the academy is some sort of GEOMETRY club. Don’t come into our CLUBHOUSE if you don’t know what a HEXAGON is.

No..his point was…don’t come in here if you’re just a Sophist…don’t come in here if you’re just someone that just wants to talk philosophy as some sort of intellectual game for your AMUSEMENT. Cause we aren’t playing GAMES over here in the academy. We are ALL here because we are united, behind the common goal of trying to ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND REALITY. And Geometry, for SEVERAL reasons Simone Weil thought…is a very PURE way of trying to understand the shapes and the CONFIGURATIONS of those shapes that MAKE up the world around you. To study and understand a SPHERE…was to study and understand something that ACTUALLY exists in reality. And something that EXISTS in reality is always subject to the limitations of the real world. In other words, reality was ALWAYS a MEDIUM for our knowledge ABOUT things. 

But around the time of Descartes something changes. There’s a SHIFT from EXPRESSING things geometrically…to expressing things ALGEBRAICALLY. All of a sudden…FORMULAS written down on a piece of paper can represent geometric shapes. All of a sudden we’re not talking about REAL geometric shapes, but abstract theoretical ones. 

Now on one hand this is a GREAT THING for humanity. First of all, we no longer need to have a REAL SPHERE existing in reality to be able to STUDY it. So this is GREAT because we’re no longer LIMITED, to just the SPHERES we HAVE ACCESS to in this small pocket of the universe that we live in. More than that…these theoretical spheres can be MANIPULATED in EXTREME WAYS. There are no LIMITS to the NUMBER of hypothetical spheres you can study. There are no LIMITS to the way that sphere is EXPRESSED on paper: a theoretical sphere can be represented by an INFINITE SUM of algebraic points…something that in REALITY is impossible, but on paper all you need is a couple of parenthesis and three dots. 

In other words Simone Weil says…we are NOW using symbols or SIGNS on a piece of paper…to represent something that DOESN’T ACTUALLY exist in reality. We’ve traded an understanding of ACTUAL reality…for an understanding of elaborate theoretical abstractions. 

And that’s FINE when you’re writing algebra problems for middle schoolers testing their theoretical knowledge…you know to say John has X number of oranges…there doesn’t REALLY need to be a John or Oranges in reality for that kind of math to be useful. It’s not trying to UNDERSTAND reality. Similarly…if you’re just solving a math puzzle because its a fun intellectual exercise…REALITY doesn’t really matter there either.

But JUST as she thought Plato recognized with the inscription over the doorway to the academy…if you’re somebody TRULY trying to understand reality…you CAN’T exist EXCLUSIVELY in the realm of the abstract. Because this may seem HARMLESS when people are doing ALGEBRA…but when this ALGEBRAIC way of understanding abstract reality starts to INFECT the rest of academia…you can IMAGINE what happens when you start APPLYING this way of thinking to SOCIAL systems. Where you’re not considering REAL limitations that are built into how peop le live their lives. Or the REAL people that become oppressed and entrenched in these systems that when they were conceptualized theoretically, these people were just DATA points. You can understand even at an individual level what can happen when people start to favor an abstract, theoretical, ideological understanding of reality…over an ACTUAL understanding of reality where they’re honestly seeking the truth. 

And if we go back to the mathematician from her example…JUST to EVEN GET to a place where you’re LIKE this mathematician…where you are ACTUALLY SEEKING the truth and DEALING with the social costs associated with TAKING that path…that’s a HARD ENOUGH place to get to all by itself. But then out of RESPECT to the REST of her moral dilemma…to ask the FURTHER question of what the mathematician should DO when he’s in that situation…I mean what CAN he do at a certain point?

Simone Weil says the way he’s MOST likely going to respond to getting beaten for arriving at even numbers…is that he’ll DO THESE MATH problems, he’ll seek the truth to a CERTAIN extent…but that when he ARRIVES at an answer that’s an EVEN NUMBER…he’ll just GIVE these social overlords the wrong answer on PURPOSE so that the answer is ALWAYS an answer that they APPROVE of. 

And this is a METAPHOR for people that have EVERY INTENTION of being as open and receptive as they possibly can be…but when FACED with the cost of LIVING a morally consistent life, often FEELING culturally uprooted THEMSELVES…they will often CHOOSE to JOIN one of these collective ways of thinking instead. The political ideology, the religion, the cult of personality. To Simone Weil… people learn through intense social conditioning as WELL as just tendencies in their biology, to FAVOR, this CONSTANT antagonism towards other people… over ACTUALLY getting closer to the truth. 

They PREFER to CONSTANTLY be at each other’s throats…BATTLING ONE oversimplified collective assumption against another…asserting what THEY believe to be THE right answer, against their ENEMIES, who are ALWAYS in the wrong…like two political parties that are so hellbent on their own survival… that getting to the truth…ISN’T even something that’s really a priority to them anymore. 

Now this may sound DEPRESSING at first for some people. There’s philosophers out there that just LOVE talking about how the entire world’s on the verge of collapsing…and then they got next to NOTHING in terms of what we can DO about it.

But that’s NOT the case with someone like Simone Weil. There’s ALWAYS this feeling of HOPE and OPTIMISM in her journals, at LEAST from MY perspective as I read them. 

She REALLY does remind me sometimes WHEN I’m reading her…of what FEELS like a religious figure you’d READ about from history that was born into the world… and she looks around her during her short time here and SEES people in CHAINS…both LITERAL CHAINS as well as economic and POLITICAL chains…and as she writes it feels like what she’s GENUINELY TRYING to do with her life is to understand the problems that have LED to those chains people are in and she’s trying to come up with SOME way that she can help LIBERATE these people from them.

And so her work is NOT JUST CRITICISM…it’s ALWAYS coming from the position of like, if we can agree that we got these BIG problems in the world…and HERE’S the way people will commonly SEE their fellow human beings when they’re being ragdolled around by political and economic FORCE…well, that’s ONE way of lookin’ at things…but here’s some hope she says…there is this SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION that is potentially available to EVERYONE.

There’s an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT way of orienting yourself toward the world that makes you see everything and everyone in it, completely differently. 

For example, TAKE that seemingly default ANTAGONISM that people have towards each other from before…where they’re CONSTANTLY pitting THEIR SUPPOSEDLY, PRIVILEGED knowledge of the world up against all the other takes that are WRONG about the world. Is there possibly a DIFFERENT way of orienting yourself to that whole process? Simone Weil would say yes.

Remember attention for her, was NOT a set of tasks you have to perform and then after DOING those things you’ll get to the truth…it wasn’t a method…it wasn’t a decision tree. Attention, was a way of BEING to her…and it was an orientation that you had towards EVERYTHING in your reality, INCLUDING this process of exchanging knowledge. 

She’d probably say, sure…someone can ABSOLUTELY CHOOSE to see the quest for knowledge in their life… as a constant BATTLE between competing positions…YOU do the research…YOU arrive at knowledge about stuff…and NOW it’s about ARGUING and DEFENDING your positions on things. 

But a totally DIFFERENT way of seeing knowledge that’s JUST as reasonable from this different way of orienting your attention…is that knowledge is always just a FRAGMENT, of a giant network of ideas that all connect together, sometimes in strange and surprising ways. And that everything that YOU know so far about reality…is REALLY just ONE perspective, of PARTIAL truths, that have been revealed to you in one small PORTION of this network, along a lifetime journey of arriving at deeper levels of clarity and perspective. 

So, when your attention is oriented in THIS way you’re not out looking for fixed, immutable FACTS about reality that you can build your entire identity around. You’re MORE looking for NEW ways that seemingly UNRELATED things may connect. And when someone disagrees with you and has a DIFFERENT READ on the world… that’s not necessarily something that needs to be FIXED by you…it can be a VALUABLE insight into a DIFFERENT perspective that you never had access to before. 

And this is NOT an argument for relativism by the way, or that you CAN’T criticize bad ideas or make intellectual progress moving forward…it’s actually the opposite to Simone Weil. Because FROM this more open, receptive orientation where you remove your EGO from this whole process of exchanging knowledge…from THAT perspective when someone else sees something different than you do…it starts to not feel like as much of a direct affront to your existence. 

And yeah of course, some of the time you’re going to be talking to someone, who believes in verifiable NONSENSE…and IN THOSE CASES you’re PROBABLY not going to have much REVEALED to you about this vast network of ideas…but for every ONE of those people, you’ll have 100 people that AGREE with you on most stuff, but DISAGREE with you in key areas, where this POSTURE of openness makes the outcome of the conversation less of that DEFAULT, IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE format that MOST people are fixed in…and more of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Point is: there’s an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT way of looking at things where you don’t have to spend your life choosing sides between various forms of collective thought… and this is yet ANOTHER example in Simone Weil’s work of trying to get PAST the particulars to be able to get to something more universal.

Simone Weil, referencing the mathematician we talked about at the beginning… again at this EARLIER stage in her work she’s gonna say that the CORRECT thing for the mathematician to do in his situation where he’s getting BEATEN for even numbers…would be, to run away. 

And to continue the metaphor here…by saying that he should run away from the situation…what Simone Weil is REALLY saying is that he should choose to NOT participate in ANY collective way of thinking that society is trying to coerce him into by force. In other words…she would say… he should TRY to find a way to choose LUCIDITY…over ideology. Again we’ll talk about WHY this answer would get FAR more COMPLICATED for her later on in her life…but let’s talk for a second about the importance of LUCIDITY in her work. 

Being able to think CLEARLY… is one of the most IMPORTANT responsibilities we have to Simone Weil…and it is an ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL thing for you to take seriously in your life…if you ever want to be able to resist, ANYTHING you think is BAD about this world and try to make it into a better place. She says that lucidity, “does away with insatiable desire and vain fears; from this and not from anything else proceed moderation and courage, virtues without which life is nothing but a disgraceful frenzy.”

This is why lucidity and this NEW form of attention is the ANTIDOTE she says to political force and colonization. Because THINK of what skills you’re CULTIVATING when you practice attention. You seek the truth rather than ideology. You seek universals rather than particulars. You seek the impersonal rather than the personal. You seek truly lucid, clear thinking…as opposed to the unmoderated, cowardly, disgraceful FRENZY of collective thought. 

She writes in one of her journals about totalitarianism…and how the entire GAME that’s going on in a totalitarian society…is that some GROUP at the top is trying to give the population ONE, SINGLE, OVERSIMPLIFIED political narrative about WHAT’S going on…and then they make sure through propaganda, censorship and murder…that no COMPETING takes on what’s going on can ever get off the ground too far. She thinks people who are spiritually afflicted, are DRAWN to a simple NARRATIVE like this MOSTLY because they’re so FATIGUED from their lack of roots and representation.

But again, there’s HOPE here for Simone Weil. This ATTENTION, being passively active and open to different READS on the world around you…THIS IS THE ANTIDOTE… to the homogenization, that a totalitarian society seeks where everyone thinks the same, acts the same and looks the same. 

This is also why it should be said…ATTENTION and MASSES of people with the ability to think clearly…is a TERRIFYING concept to anyone who’s seeking to control people for the benefit of their own projects. And YES that applies to people in positions of SOCIAL power…but that ALSO applies to tyrants that exist in your own home or in your friend groups or in your relationships. 

But anyway…let’s CONTINUE with this episode just ASSUMING that we’ve all sufficiently been SOLD on this CONCEPT of attention. Like I GET IT, Simone Weil. And by GOLLY you’re right. The world has problems. And POLITICAL revolution isn’t the first or BEST response that’s going to ACTUALLY have results…the change is GOING to have to start in the heart of the individual and the way we SEE our neighbors and the world around us. Uh, but how EXACTLY does somebody go about doing that again? 

Because it’s one thing to say…oh just NEVER identify with a political party…never join ANY collective of thought…just be a RUBIX cube of a person. Easier SAID than done…and by the way about this spiritual transformation you keep talking about…how do I… go about doing THAT? I mean you may BE Simone Weil for sure…but me, look you don’t KNOW me… I got french fries in my car in between the drivers seat and center console that have been there LITERALLY for more than a year. Am I REALLY the guy to do this? You think I got the intestinal fortitude to spiritually transform myself?

Well, yes she thinks we ALL do. She says ironically one of the biggest BOUNDARIES people face when it comes to REACHING deeper levels of this attention is just… consent. Meaning, people like the IDEA in THEORY of having this kind of access to different reads of the world, but in reality there are actually a LOT of obstacles that make it hard for people to TRULY consent to CULTIVATING this new way of looking at things. 

And there’s exercises you can do if you WANTED to develop this type of attention more, and rest assured we’re going to talk about the ones she recommends. But before we talk about those… it’s crucially important for us FIRST understand the way Simone Weil thought about attention more GENERALLY…as something that SHE thinks.. is one of the most forgotten, and under rated ways in the HISTORY of the world, of transforming your experience of the things you do. 

Let’s start with an example. Say you want to CHANGE something about yourself, WHATEVER it is. What’s the FIRST place people usually think that THAT CHANGE is going to occur? Well your ANSWER to this question… will probably be varied based on when and where you live…and the most COMMON answer in the MODERN, western world, just given the genealogy of ascetic practices in judeo-christian culture…the most common answers going to be that change happens through something like WILL POWER, or through DISCIPLINE. 

There’s of course VARIATIONS in the EXACT TERMINOLOGY that people will use…but just GIVEN the classic western, HEROES JOURNEY way that we typically THINK about morality…this is just how MOST people in the western world are going to answer this. 

You wanna CHANGE SOMETHING about your reality? You take CONTROL of your reality, you ASSERT yourself… on reality.  

Say you wanted to READ more. But you HATE reading. So you assume the ONLY way that’s ever gonna CHANGE, is if you have more discipline. You set an alarm on your phone…you’re gonna WILL yourself to read EVERY SINGLE DAY for 30 minutes RIGHT when you get off of work. 

And you KNOW it’s gonna be hard. You KNOW you’re gonna have to grit your teeth and fight through it at times…but eventually, with enough STRENGTH of the will…you’re gonna get some momentum behind you…people are gonna start NOTICING and giving you CREDIT for READING more…then after a while, hopefully, reading just becomes a habit for you…and then once it’s habituated into your daily routine, you won’t need to exert as much WILL to get yourself to DO it anymore. 

After a couple MONTHS of doing this…you don’t even really fight it anymore. You just read after work. That’s a THING you do now. Think to yourself congratulations, hypothetical steve…I have successfully CHANGED my life for the better. 

And that is a PERFECTLY, DECENT way to CHANGE something about yourself. But Simone Weil thought by the end of her life that INSTEAD of cultivating WILL power…cultivating ATTENTION… was just a much better way of transforming yourself, all things considered. And it’s not that she hated the idea of strengthening the will…she was a big fan of stoicism, she wrote in her early journals a LOT about willpower as something that kept her on the moral path she wanted to be on…but you try to IMPROVE yourself enough in this life and the question you eventually have to ask is: is will power…. the ONLY skill that is useful to develop when it comes to improving yourself? Is it even the BEST skill to develop?

Just like when we were talking before about exchanging knowledge, and how, if you WANTED to see the world in a new way that there’s a totally different way of LOOKING at that whole process. If you hate reading. Yeah, you can force yourself to do something that you hate to do over and over again. You can exert that “muscular effort” as she calls it…she says you can CONTRACT your spirit and focus on this one small activity that you don’t like doing and FORCE yourself to DO it. 

But ANOTHER way of approaching the problem she says is to OPEN your spirit… RATHER than contracting it. Instead of spending effort FORCING yourself to READ…spend that SAME amount of effort REORIENTING the way you’re THINKING about the task of reading. Maybe looking at it from a different angle, maybe learning something NEW about it, maybe putting in effort to try to FIND something that INTERESTS you about reading that you had never really CONSIDERED before, THAT’S a place to put in effort TOO.

Now, it should be said…this sort of openness to existence… is a skill…JUST like discipline. It takes JUST as much practice as discipline. It’s rife with JUST as many potential failures along your journey of cultivating it. But what if instead of getting SUPER good at forcing yourself to do things you don’t like…you got SUPER good at reimagining the things you get no joy out of… to BE things, that you DO get joy out of? 

We all know what it feels like to dislike something or someone…but then when we step outside of our assumptions about that thing or that person…when we start thinking CLEARLY…when we again, get OUT of those vain fears she talked about before…we all know what it feels like to end up really ENJOYING a thing, that we USED to think was horrible. 

This is attacking the process of self transformation from the other side. And the end result is that instead of change occurring by ENDURING something that you hate for months…your life is driven INSTEAD, to Simone Weil, by a TRUE desire, to DO the thing. Your life is driven by JOY, rather than self-denial. 

Now I can just hear a bunch of super disciplined people out there hearing this… swinging their kettlebells around violently…this is PREPOSTEROUS. This is just turning everything HARD into something you LIKE. I thought that if you respect someone…I thought they had to go out into the wilderness, NAKED and choke out a caribou or something. 

Well no that’s certainly ONE type of person we have respect for…but there’s more to a person’s character to Simone Weil than just being able to CONTROL situations, by ASSERTING THEIR WILL on them. And there’s obvious parallels here to the person that thinks they can get to the TRUTH by asserting themselves upon reality. Or the person who connects to other PEOPLE by projecting THEIR experience onto everyone else. Sometimes the more useful skill to have is NOT to be able to WILL your reality into existence…but to be able to be so OPEN, so curious and HUMBLE…that you become someone CAPABLE of allowing REALITY and EXISTENCE…to speak through YOU.