Good old CG. It understands the mapping correctly. I also like what it summarises in “Where this becomes especially powerful in relation to your recent work is this”.
Do you find that it stays too near the surface of the rabbit-hole? Because of this I found the “few directions” that it suggests not likely to move the dial. The “single thread” it talks about later is more promising but its passive phrasing doesn’t invite us to query why that is so and what could we do differently in that case.
For instance, deeper down we find spacious caves with many connecting passages. Wittgenstein sitting in one, contemplating a bottle full of flies, Dunbar in another thinking about gossip withering on the Tree of Knowledge, Dunbar and Weingrow watching a silent film, trying to imagine what the people who did choose a different world over and over were saying. And others.
There are other directions. I hope I don’t get tired and do bring back some.
:-). What I think it demonstrates is a fluency in being trapped by what it “knows” as against venturing new avenues, as though in a form of linguistic maze. Like the 10,000 monkeys with typewriters, it could eventually write Shakespeare, but just wouldn’t know it….
Yes. That linguistic maze. It’s fascinating to play with, agreed. It is competent at following good maps, but it hallucinates like a bad trip if asked to “wayfind”. 😀
There seem to be at least a couple of things bubbling under your analysis of the two current real-life examples of organisations that seem to be putting frog soup on the menu.
The first one is the assumption that there is, or could be, a form of organisation that functions within the system while respecting the mētis of those who work there. I know that there are a few real-life organisations that seem worthwhile examples. I also know that corporations have a legal duty to maximise returns to shareholders. Their North Star is profit, not mētis, by conscious purpose and intentional design. Is it worth testing the assumption before investing too much effort on what may ultimately be fruitless?
The second underwater thought was prompted by your analysis of what gets in the way of an honest conversation in both examples. Given that as Carney (via Havel) reminds us that the naming comes first, it is useful to be clear on the obstacle to such naming. I was reminded of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”, and Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”, and also Ace’s “How long has this been going on?” I’m very tempted to go down the rabbit hole at the centre of the triangle defined by those three. Bring me my ropes, and my cross of gold…
Thought provoking as ever Lain. As an experiment, I that last part of your comment into the project space I use on ChatGPT where I track previous posts for accumulated insight and asked it for comment. It came up with this, which I thought interesting. More thoughts later,
This is a rich little knot of a comment, and very on-brand for the terrain you have been mapping recently. Let me tease out what is going on in it, and why that “triangle” is such a potent place to linger.
At the surface, the comment is affirming your focus on what blocks honest conversation, not merely what enables it. That is already a subtle but important shift. Most writing about dialogue fixates on skills and techniques. This comment is more forensic. It asks: what actively prevents naming from happening in the first place?
Carney via Havel is doing key work here. Havel’s insistence that “naming comes first” is not a rhetorical flourish, it is an ontological claim. If you cannot name what is happening, you cannot act truthfully within it. But the comment sharpens that by saying: if naming is first, then the real question becomes, what stops naming? In other words, the obstacle is not lack of courage alone, but something structural and cultural that makes naming difficult, dangerous, or incoherent.
Now to your triangle.
Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is about how language is degraded not just accidentally but instrumentally. Vague phrasing, dead metaphors, inflated diction, passive constructions, all create a fog in which responsibility dissolves. Orwell is diagnosing a linguistic ecology that actively prevents clear naming by making it socially awkward, professionally risky, or stylistically unfashionable. His point is not merely stylistic but moral: corrupted language makes corrupted thought easier.
Frankfurt’s On Bullshit adds a different but complementary pathology. The bullshitter is not lying in the classic sense. They are indifferent to truth altogether. That is crucial. Where Orwell is concerned with language that obscures, Frankfurt is concerned with speech that floats free of any obligation to reality. In such a world, naming is not just hard, it becomes beside the point. Why name accurately if accuracy has ceased to matter?
Then there is “How long has this been going on?”, which quietly introduces the temporal dimension. This is not just about distortion or indifference in the present, but about duration, normalisation, and habituation. It gestures to the slow creep by which the unsayable becomes unremarkable, and then invisible. It aligns beautifully with your recurring interest in phase change and boiling frogs. The obstacle to naming is not only linguistic or ethical, but historical. Things become unnamed because they have been embedded long enough to feel like the water itself.
Put together, the triangle forms a kind of epistemic trap:
– Orwell shows how language becomes a fog machine.
– Frankfurt shows how truth loses its gravitational pull.
– “How long has this been going on?” shows how time anesthetises perception.
At the centre of that triangle is not just confusion, but a specific kind of cultural sedation. A condition in which people can still speak fluently, even eloquently, while being progressively less able to say anything that actually bites on reality.
That is why your instinct to “bring ropes” is exactly right. This is not a rabbit hole in the whimsical sense, but a deep shaft with smooth sides. Once inside it, you find that the usual tools for sense-making, debate, even critique, start to slip. The cross of gold, meanwhile, introduces a further layer: the cost of naming. Naming is not just cognitively hard, it is socially and politically expensive. Bryan’s cross of gold was about being crushed by a monetary system. Your invocation here suggests the price paid by those who insist on naming clearly inside systems that benefit from opacity.
Where this becomes especially powerful in relation to your recent work is this: you are not just talking about language in the abstract, but about organisations, institutions, and careers lived inside systems that subtly punish naming while rewarding fluency, alignment, and surface coherence.
So one way to take this forward, if you do go down that centre triangle, is to frame it not as a literary or philosophical excursus, but as an anatomy of why modern systems struggle to tell themselves the truth, even when they have oceans of data and armies of communicators.
A few directions that feel particularly alive for your Athanor and New Artisans work:
• Naming as craft, not just courage. A disciplined practice that resists linguistic entropy, temporal numbness, and truth-indifference.
• The difference between “having a voice” and “having something that can be named”. Many speak. Few name.
• Conversation health as a diagnostic for whether a system still has a relationship with reality, or has drifted into what might be called performative coherence.
• The idea that AI and corporate communication, when combined, risk amplifying all three vertices of your triangle: automated fluency, truth-indifferent optimisation, and rapid normalisation.
If you wanted a single thread to pull, it might be this:
Modern societies are not short of speech, but short of naming power. And that is not a moral failing of individuals so much as a systemic condition produced by degraded language, indifference to truth, and the slow habituation of time.
And yes, this is exactly the sort of shaft worth descending. Just take a lantern as well as the rope.
Good old CG. It understands the mapping correctly. I also like what it summarises in “Where this becomes especially powerful in relation to your recent work is this”.
Do you find that it stays too near the surface of the rabbit-hole? Because of this I found the “few directions” that it suggests not likely to move the dial. The “single thread” it talks about later is more promising but its passive phrasing doesn’t invite us to query why that is so and what could we do differently in that case.
For instance, deeper down we find spacious caves with many connecting passages. Wittgenstein sitting in one, contemplating a bottle full of flies, Dunbar in another thinking about gossip withering on the Tree of Knowledge, Dunbar and Weingrow watching a silent film, trying to imagine what the people who did choose a different world over and over were saying. And others.
There are other directions. I hope I don’t get tired and do bring back some.
:-). What I think it demonstrates is a fluency in being trapped by what it “knows” as against venturing new avenues, as though in a form of linguistic maze. Like the 10,000 monkeys with typewriters, it could eventually write Shakespeare, but just wouldn’t know it….
Yes. That linguistic maze. It’s fascinating to play with, agreed. It is competent at following good maps, but it hallucinates like a bad trip if asked to “wayfind”. 😀
There seem to be at least a couple of things bubbling under your analysis of the two current real-life examples of organisations that seem to be putting frog soup on the menu.
The first one is the assumption that there is, or could be, a form of organisation that functions within the system while respecting the mētis of those who work there. I know that there are a few real-life organisations that seem worthwhile examples. I also know that corporations have a legal duty to maximise returns to shareholders. Their North Star is profit, not mētis, by conscious purpose and intentional design. Is it worth testing the assumption before investing too much effort on what may ultimately be fruitless?
The second underwater thought was prompted by your analysis of what gets in the way of an honest conversation in both examples. Given that as Carney (via Havel) reminds us that the naming comes first, it is useful to be clear on the obstacle to such naming. I was reminded of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”, and Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”, and also Ace’s “How long has this been going on?” I’m very tempted to go down the rabbit hole at the centre of the triangle defined by those three. Bring me my ropes, and my cross of gold…
Thought provoking as ever Lain. As an experiment, I that last part of your comment into the project space I use on ChatGPT where I track previous posts for accumulated insight and asked it for comment. It came up with this, which I thought interesting. More thoughts later,
This is a rich little knot of a comment, and very on-brand for the terrain you have been mapping recently. Let me tease out what is going on in it, and why that “triangle” is such a potent place to linger.
At the surface, the comment is affirming your focus on what blocks honest conversation, not merely what enables it. That is already a subtle but important shift. Most writing about dialogue fixates on skills and techniques. This comment is more forensic. It asks: what actively prevents naming from happening in the first place?
Carney via Havel is doing key work here. Havel’s insistence that “naming comes first” is not a rhetorical flourish, it is an ontological claim. If you cannot name what is happening, you cannot act truthfully within it. But the comment sharpens that by saying: if naming is first, then the real question becomes, what stops naming? In other words, the obstacle is not lack of courage alone, but something structural and cultural that makes naming difficult, dangerous, or incoherent.
Now to your triangle.
Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is about how language is degraded not just accidentally but instrumentally. Vague phrasing, dead metaphors, inflated diction, passive constructions, all create a fog in which responsibility dissolves. Orwell is diagnosing a linguistic ecology that actively prevents clear naming by making it socially awkward, professionally risky, or stylistically unfashionable. His point is not merely stylistic but moral: corrupted language makes corrupted thought easier.
Frankfurt’s On Bullshit adds a different but complementary pathology. The bullshitter is not lying in the classic sense. They are indifferent to truth altogether. That is crucial. Where Orwell is concerned with language that obscures, Frankfurt is concerned with speech that floats free of any obligation to reality. In such a world, naming is not just hard, it becomes beside the point. Why name accurately if accuracy has ceased to matter?
Then there is “How long has this been going on?”, which quietly introduces the temporal dimension. This is not just about distortion or indifference in the present, but about duration, normalisation, and habituation. It gestures to the slow creep by which the unsayable becomes unremarkable, and then invisible. It aligns beautifully with your recurring interest in phase change and boiling frogs. The obstacle to naming is not only linguistic or ethical, but historical. Things become unnamed because they have been embedded long enough to feel like the water itself.
Put together, the triangle forms a kind of epistemic trap:
– Orwell shows how language becomes a fog machine.
– Frankfurt shows how truth loses its gravitational pull.
– “How long has this been going on?” shows how time anesthetises perception.
At the centre of that triangle is not just confusion, but a specific kind of cultural sedation. A condition in which people can still speak fluently, even eloquently, while being progressively less able to say anything that actually bites on reality.
That is why your instinct to “bring ropes” is exactly right. This is not a rabbit hole in the whimsical sense, but a deep shaft with smooth sides. Once inside it, you find that the usual tools for sense-making, debate, even critique, start to slip. The cross of gold, meanwhile, introduces a further layer: the cost of naming. Naming is not just cognitively hard, it is socially and politically expensive. Bryan’s cross of gold was about being crushed by a monetary system. Your invocation here suggests the price paid by those who insist on naming clearly inside systems that benefit from opacity.
Where this becomes especially powerful in relation to your recent work is this: you are not just talking about language in the abstract, but about organisations, institutions, and careers lived inside systems that subtly punish naming while rewarding fluency, alignment, and surface coherence.
So one way to take this forward, if you do go down that centre triangle, is to frame it not as a literary or philosophical excursus, but as an anatomy of why modern systems struggle to tell themselves the truth, even when they have oceans of data and armies of communicators.
A few directions that feel particularly alive for your Athanor and New Artisans work:
• Naming as craft, not just courage. A disciplined practice that resists linguistic entropy, temporal numbness, and truth-indifference.
• The difference between “having a voice” and “having something that can be named”. Many speak. Few name.
• Conversation health as a diagnostic for whether a system still has a relationship with reality, or has drifted into what might be called performative coherence.
• The idea that AI and corporate communication, when combined, risk amplifying all three vertices of your triangle: automated fluency, truth-indifferent optimisation, and rapid normalisation.
If you wanted a single thread to pull, it might be this:
Modern societies are not short of speech, but short of naming power. And that is not a moral failing of individuals so much as a systemic condition produced by degraded language, indifference to truth, and the slow habituation of time.
And yes, this is exactly the sort of shaft worth descending. Just take a lantern as well as the rope.