Philosophy

A Different Kind of A-Hole

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As regular readers know, I consider myself a Taoist, and am using reading some Taoist literature or other philosophical or artistic writing. Often I find myself fascinated at how much brilliant wisdom people had thousands of years ago – and how often they tried to get someone to listen to them.

Today, I try to imagine exposing certain people to the wisdom of, say, the Taoists. Would they pay attention to warnings about being overburdened with desires? Could advice on not wrecking the environment from fifteen hundred years ago still reach someone wrecking the environment now? Could people maybe not screw everything up for everyone?

I mean how many Business A-holes got The Art of War and tossed it as it wasn’t what they expected There’s a reason I see many copies at used book stores. So I kind of am of the opinion “lots of so-called leaders would ignore good advice.”

So as I contemplated the plight of the political Taoists and their like, something struck me. I was thinking about people who lived thousands of years before me, in vastly different environments. As I’ve written before, such people lived in different worlds, and they dealt with a different kind of A-hole.

I thought about the political Taoists and others like the Confucians attempting to convince some feudal lord of the rightness of their teachings (and the personal benefits). Such a person might be royalty, but because their father or grandfather overthrew the last guy. They still have relatives who may be in the fields or the military or in the mercantile professions. This imaginary feudal lord may hear, see, and smell everyday life in their province – which might be as small as the real-estate of a small city. Droughts, harvests, weather, floods affect them as well as the people under them and they get to fear assassination or conquest.

Oh they may be a-holes. They may be violent, they may not be nice, they may have a strong hand in rulership. But they exist as human a-holes, they have human contact, human feelings. As abstract as royalty may be, there’s a chance they’re still as human as others, even if not nice humans.

There’s a chance such people might listen to your ideas, after all even if they’re a-holes.

Now today, how many leaders exist in bubbles that feudal lords of China and ancient kings could ever imagine? How many people with power exists inside a media echo-sphere worse than any group of sycophantic ministers? We have leaders and supposed rulers who never worry of hunger or pollution, who can’t see, hear, or smell the everyday lives of people.

Such folks seem much harder to convince because they’re not just abstract from people but abstract from humanity. There’s a point where insulation becomes inhumanity or at least mental illness. No wonder some supposed elites suck down psychedelics trying to feel something.

This does not decrease my enthusiasm for the wisdom of the Taoists and those like them. It’s just a reminder that much advice requires you to reach someone’s humanity.

The problem is you have to know how to find that humanity first, and that can be a challenge. Worse, it may not be there.

– Xenofact

Win One For Confucians

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Win One For Confucians

Last column I talked about how Taoists irritated with detail-obsessed Confucians reminded me of how people got annoyed with conspiracy theorists. It was a strange revelation, and one I’ll probably analyze for awhile to understand underlying human behavior. But let’s talk about something I learned from my (limited) reading of Confucian thought.

First, I want to be open about my opinions – and limits on my knowledge – of Confucianism. I took an interest in it due to A) Taoists arguing with them and B) an interest Chinese history, usually communications. I’ve read a few texts, a few historical documents, and a larger amount of Taoist mockery or fellow-feeling depending on when said texts were written. I’m no expert.

I would sum it up as “anal-retentive humanism about cultivating morality.” Confucius himself seems to have been a thoughtful, witty, pleasant, but at times anxious or neurotic person who didn’t seem to really intend to found a religion. In practice it has often served power and patriarchal culture, but through it run elements of counter-culturalism and principle. My limited experience have been more “WTF” than I expected.

But in my limited readings, a story stood out – one that, years later, taught me a lesson. So let’s give the Confucians a win.

In my readings there are often stories about the importance of mourning one’s parents when they pass. It’s important to recognize their sacrifice, the duration of mourning, and so on. There’s enough dead parents in a casual reading Confucian literature to make you worry you stepped into a Disney film. Yes I get filial piety and all that, but still.

Once or twice I’d encounter a story of an king who’s father (who had stepped down) passed away. This meant big public ceremonies and so on because, hey, dead king. What stood out to me is people being impressed at how sad the living king was, how he wept and mourned so aggressively. At first I thought the stories were annoying, performative – I mean, you know, let’s not make a show of it, be honest.

Years later, as I contemplated politics in America in the 2020s I thought about all the transgressive politicians. The ones that were basically online Influencers, the ones acting like they were Shock Jocks. The ones who were supposedly both the best of us and hideous assholes and in no way role models.

They were being performatively against what we supposedly valued.

. . . and suddenly I got the king and his Big Mourning.

I don’t want leaders who violate our principles, I want them to embody them. I want the continuity and stability of society, not its fracturing. Wanting leaders that violate everything you say you care about means you’re both an asshole and destructive – and stupid. Even if a leader is, dare I say it, a bit performative, it’s saying there’s an agreement on what matters, even if things might get a tad fuzzy around things in the “best face forward” way.

Moral performances of certain kinds – what people might call “virtue signaling” – are ways of communicating and reinforcing values. They are reflections of the agreement that hold society together. It may be a janky agreement, it may have edge cases that aren’t on the edge, but unless a society is totally screwed, it matters.

Then I got it. These kings were virtue signaling, but about stuff important to the community, the love of parents, the proper activities. King and peasant were bonded together in “when we lose our parents, we respect those that created us.” A weeping king was, at that moment no different than a farmer who lost his mother and father.

So know what? Chalk one up for the early Confucian writers. Some moral and ethical continuity, via ritual, is important. Yeah it might not be 100% true or honest all the time, but if it’s enough for society to grow and function, then it’s important. It might not seem like a ritual, but there is a time to say “we are on the same side” and act on it.

Because we’ve damn well seen what happens when destroying everything is lauded, and violating what actually works is worshiped.

-Xenofact

Good for the Spirit, Good for the Mind

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As I write this there’s a huge, understandable panic that AI is being used by students so much they don’t know how to read and analyze it. If you are reading this in a future years removed from this essay, I hope you live in a world where AI isn’t such a concern, and you’reNOTin some post-apocalyptic disaster.

Anyway, whatever your chronological state, here in 2025 it’s been quite a concern. If you let AI write for you, analyze for you, etc. you are essentially outsourcing your thinking and your humanity. You will not develop skills you need to read books and understand things, and the skills you do have will decay.

This in turn made me think about spiritual and philosophical writing and how it trains you to read, analyze and understand. For the sake of brevity to encompass such things for self-development I shall call them spiritual works here.

When we sit down with a spiritual work we are attempting to contemplate, grow, and understand some very serious issues. We bring to it a desire to understand and grow, to engage with the work. The attitude of becoming involved in the work is there at the start.

In turn, the engagement is needed.

Spiritual works are about deep issues, and you will find yourself pausing to contemplate and analyze. We’ve all experienced moments where a paragraph or a page can hold our attention for a half hour. In spiritual works, you may find yourself going over something word by word just thinking what it means.

Spiritual works often use symbolism and metaphor as that may be easy to communicate complex truths, represent the otherwise indescribable, or lead you around a bit to help you learn. Symbolism also helps you think, how the symbols work together, what they really mean, and so on. Again, you are engaged with the work, connected to it.

Finally, many spiritual works are often grounded in a place, a person, an experience, a lineage, etc. To engage with spiritual work is to engage with much more than a book or a menial or a series of poems – it’s to learn about who produced it and the situation that led to it. One small book can lead you to a world of context – and a greater point of view.

Reading a good spiritual work teaches you to read, analyze, understand. A person with an interest about such issues can, in time, give themselves ersatz literary training. I once read a book called DIY MFA about how a person can read and write and analyze to gain similar experiences to getting an MFA – and that feels very familiar in spiritual writing.

So in a world of AI writing and AI reading, remember our spiritual pursuits. Sitting down with a book on philosophy or meditation or metaphysics isn’t just enriching morally or spiritually – it’s enriching literately. Your wrestling with ethics or breath meditation or divinities also helps you learn to read, analyze, and understand.

Just another reason to do it, I suppose.

-Xenofact