Triangulations III: How Not to Be a Dork and Other Lessons From Our Girard x Rao △

On Kingship, Appreciating Nietzsche, Dealing with Muses, Anti-mimetic Scholarship, etc.

I was at lunch with some friends. I don't remember the conversation, but I remember that I was about to correct my friend's wrong statement. As I initiated the launch sequence with "actually..." I recalled our triangle and realized that perhaps my friend and I were on different corners of it.

This is an upgrade to my metacognition. I now sometimes catch myself being the dork in the ACKCHYUALLY meme when the normies are just vibing. In the past, I did not even realize that others were in a different corner of the triangle. My home base is the epistemology of truth. This has been my training and my work. And perhaps I was born this way.

What are the other practical applications of the Philosopher-Citizen-King triangle? This third and final part of Triangulations maps out some answers.

1. Dealing With Sociopaths and Normies

I’ve worked to limit my exposure to power players. But they are unavoidable when I have to deal with the government. Coming from the epistemology of truth, I used to think that the law is a collection of rules established for the common good. This could have been the intention of their originators, most of whom might have been true believers. The reality today is that those in power tend to be those who desire power, and they operate with its epistemology. The bureaucracy is an egregore that allies with these power players. To be literal with the law is to be clueless about the actual game of power being played.

Those in the triangle of truth want to model reality accurately. To sociopaths, this commitment to truth is a distraction or just plain inefficiency in the game of power. They have simple rules of thumb that don't make sense to the scientific mind and would violate normie taboos. Here are some of the rules of Roger Stone, the literal sociopath who has helped bring several American presidents to the White House:

• Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.

• Attack, attack, attack. Never defend.

• One man’s dirty trick is another man’s civil political action.

Here are a few rules from Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power:

• Get Others to Do the Work for You, but Always Take the Credit

• Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy

• Crush Your Enemy Totally

Normie rules are likewise simple and might sound like superstition to those inside the epistemology of truth. Here's one I got from my family's Facebook chat. N=1, but Christian normies seem to make the best parents.

This is a lot like learning a new language. I now have the triangle to help me identify when a foreign language is spoken. It is a matter of growing in fluency.

When comes to normies, my goal is to be more like them. When it comes to dealing with power, my main interest is to protect my freedom.

2. Personal Sovereignty

Flipping the triangle to its positive side, my main kingly desires are to protect and provide for my family and my community, and to be a free man. To me, power feels like a burden when it is beyond what I need to fulfill my duties and my calling.

The archetype of the Philosopher, Citizen, and King also helps me examine myself and plan how to remedy my weaknesses. Perhaps a crossover between Josef Pieper’s Four Cardinal Virtues and James Clear’s Atomic Habits from the perspective of the triangle can be a good future essay.

Are there existing works that flesh out the triangles we explored here into a practical playbook for life? I can think of two, though both are not written through the lens of our triangle.

First is Nassim Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game). Perhaps you don't need the three archetypes as long as you know how to operate in an environment of uncertainty and risk. And “skin in the game" might be a way of navigating social relations without resorting to our abstractions.

What I’m looking for, in a sense, is the positive mirror image of books like Rao's Be Slightly Evil, Greene's The 48 Laws of Power, or Sun Tzu's Art of War. Rao himself says that Taleb is his opposite or his "evil twin." He writes in Be Slightly Evil:

For me, one such evil twin is the author Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Reading his new book Antifragile is almost physically painful for me.

The other book is the Bible. Reading Girard and writing this series has gotten me Christianity-pilled. I already considered myself a Christian long before diving into Girard's ideas, but his unveiling of new layers in sacred scripture has made me think that perhaps I’ve only scratched the surface of Christianity.

If we read the Bible with our triangle in mind, we see that it speaks to Sociopaths: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" The book of Matthew warns the Clueless: "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves." And St. Paul exhorts Normies: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will."

3. Real People Over Muses

Liz Gilbert's Big Magic has been my operating system for creative work since I read it years ago. One technique in particular has been extremely effective in helping me notice inspiration, say yes to them, and manifest them in the world—treating ideas as persons. I wrote about this in my first book How to Turn Ideas Into Reality.

Inspirations, she explains, are non-physical beings whose sole desire is to be manifested in this world. They roam the world seeking a human partner whose work makes this manifestation a reality. When they find someone, they present themselves and the vision of the partnership. [...]

Liz Gilbert says that she believes this literally, and she lives out this belief. For instance, she waits for ideas, all dressed up and ready to serve them, like an English butler waiting in the foyer for his master. She feels honored when she is selected to be the idea's partner. If she says Yes, she commits to that partnership.

I prefer to act as an equal to these beings rather than their servant, a project manager they could partner with. Sometimes, I let them vie for my time. I tell them, "I have space for a new project in the next few months. Who wants to be made manifest?" I hope this attitude does not discourage them from visiting me!

Communing with your muses and manifesting them in the world feels like you’re touching divinity. The serendipities that happen in the real world and the new ideas birthed within you are exactly as Liz Gilbert describes them: Big Magic. It is so good that the Faustian bargain becomes a daily possibility: to choose craft over real life, your muses over real people.

I posted this diagram on Twitter as some sort of nerdy joke, but I realized that it captures a choice I made when I became a Christian. People come before muses and egregores. This will sound obvious to normies, but to those of us who never quite fit in the world's tribes, there’s a temptation to retreat to the world of ideas, especially when you have experienced their intoxicating magic.

Satan is promising me the world as long as I bow down to him. Mephistopheles is asking for a scapegoat in exchange for creative glory: in this case, my relationship with people of flesh and blood. These are all lies. I need to learn to listen to the Holy Spirit instead.

4. Working with Egregores

To me, the most interesting pattern that emerged from the crossovers in Part II is how psychopaths collaborate with egregores to gain power. I must confess that this comes from personal experience.

In the prelude to this series, I mentioned Project Accessible Genomics, the global volunteer project I led that got featured on CNN. That was Big Magic. By the start of the pandemic, I had a couple of years of practice listening to muses. And since I'm a veteran project management professional, I had a cabinet of power tools for turning ideas into reality.

I sensed a force or energy in the online science communities I belonged to. There was a desire to be part of the solution, and to escape the prison that was the lockdown. That intuition was a conjecture, and the project's success was its confirmation. I worked with that spirit by providing a vision in line with those desires. Coordinating knowledge, capital, and work was just a matter of directing those energies. Seeing that egregore was more fundamental.

Egregores, as mentioned in Part II, are mere exhaust from humanity's consciousness. Yet they are powerful, and psychopaths throughout history have collaborated with them to reach the heights of power. Satanic egregores are still operative. Despite their unveiling by the Judeo-Christian revelation, the scapegoat mechanism still works. (This will be an interesting lens with which to compare the nationalisms of the Philippines and Mexico, my intended master's thesis.)

There must be good egregores out there, and the Philosopher-Citizen-King triangle can help identify them. Anytime there is a scapegoating of one corner, we can be sure it is a variation of satan: the murderous mob, the parasitic leader, or the intellectual out of touch with reality. The attributes of truth, love, and impact on the world all need to be present in whatever spirit we collaborate with.

The Accessible Genomics project team (and for those with eyes to see, the good spirit that brought us together), a screenshot from a talk I gave on our project lessons learned, at a webinar organized by Oxford Nanopore Technologies https://nanoporetech.com/resource-centre/bringing-genomic-covid-19-surveillance-developing-world

5. Nietzsche, a Sociopathic Philosopher

The triangle has also given me a new perspective on the work of philosophers, or at least one philosopher. I never really understood why Nietzsche is such a big deal. Why is he the favorite edgy philosopher of teenage boys when he valorized the epistemology of power but didn't himself gain power or build wealth in real life? His mother had to support him financially, and his sister had to take care of him in his sickly years.

However, situating Nietzsche within the triangle of truth shows why people who like words and ideas might consider him a groundbreaking philosopher.

Nietzsche was a power-wielding psychopath not in the real world but inside the triangle of truth. Heidegger noticed the same thing, according to Duane Armitage in his 2021 book Philosophy of the Violent Sacred:

The most remarkable aspect of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is that Heidegger understands Nietzsche as, strangely enough, primarily a metaphysician, a metaphysician obsessed with overcoming metaphysics.

Girard had a similar observation according to the same book:

According to Girard, Nietzsche is the most important philosopher and theologian of the last hundred years, for Nietzsche understands quite clearly the essence of Christianity better than anyone before. Nietzsche simply despises it.

Aside from helping me appreciate Nietzsche, Girard brought about this entire series. So I’m making him my model for scholarly work. Just as Nietzsche employed psychopathic will to power and Dionysian aliveness within his work, Girard used the awareness of the dangers of mimesis and the scapegoat mechanism in his. While 20th-century scholars dismissed grand Toynbeeesque theories as 19th-century follies, Girard spent his scholarly career on it. In other words, he was anti-mimetic. Girard also avoids scapegoating scholars he disagrees with. He uses the insights of Nietzsche and postmodernist methods while disagreeing with them on a fundamental level.

6. Closing Thought: I Want to Be a Christian Normie

The last time I voted was four presidents ago. When my grand aunt told me and my fellow non-voting siblings that this was "bad," I jokingly replied that I trust the Filipino people and I would support whoever they choose. As you might expect after this entire series, I have nerdy rationalizations behind this reply.

The first is efficiency. The Philippines consistently has a high voter turnout. In 2022, it was more than 80%. Compare this to the USA, the world's most visible champion of democracy, which had a 67% turnout in their 2020 presidential elections. The system still works without my vote.

Second is that I've seen how the sausage is made. Girard and Rao provided the conceptual maps that enabled me to describe the epistemology of power. But it was my embodied knowledge of growing up in a world ruled by sociopathic power players that gave me the intuition for it. I was so excited to vote when I turned 18, being the clueless true believer in democracy and nationhood that I was. It was downhill from there. Rao's Nietzschean triangle was so destabilizing because my intuitions and actions already lost faith before my reason found the words—or the triangle—to express them.

Writing Triangulations changed my mind. Girard's unflinching exposition of the dark core of human relations made me consider the scapegoat mechanism at work in me. Am I still that awkward kid who, having been kicked out by the normies, chose to win by operating at the tails of bell curves? I don’t mind it if the world around me burns. I know I can survive the fire and even benefit from it, as I did with the pandemic.

Girard has shown me that I cannot be a follower of Christ and continue to operate this way. Voting is just one example. It’s becoming so easy to live extremely online and stay above the messy entanglements of lives in this place and in this time. This feels wrong. I sense a hidden scapegoat paying for this escape.

I also sense that, somehow, this has to do with the truth of my writing—that what will save my work from soulless rationalism is to learn to love like a Christian normie.

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Thanks to Raymond Ng and

Latham Turner

for reading and giving feedback on the draft of this essay. Thanks as well to

Chris Coffman

: the part about muses came from our conversation.