A Modest Introduction To Sudo-Intellectual
The User’s Manual for Taking the Clear Pill and Turning Foolish Pseudo-Reforms into Practical Sudo-Solutions That Nudge us Toward a Higher Peak in the Adaptive Valley.
Thought-up and Written by Logan Jensen, Sudo-Intellectual Candidate
Edited and enhanced by GPT4.5, Claude, Grok et al; Artificial General Intelligence Candidates
Taken under advisement by you, the sudo-stakeholders of this pseudo-society.
Funding provided by you, the pseudo-shareholders of a sudo-society in the making.
What Exactly is Sudo-Intellectual?
Sudo-Intellectual will be a strange blog: its goal is equal parts to unlock your mind and unleash your spirit. We’ll talk broadly about the State, broadly defined, and the Church, loosely interpreted. We’ll delve into seeing the world through the lenses of technocratic populism and heretical orthodoxy from the perspective of both the Church and State. The intended result, if I am successful in my endeavor, will be to softly break you out of the matrix just long enough to gently come back in with a renewed perspective and a rejuvenated motivation to nudge the society we live in in better ways.
Red Pill, Blue Pill, Black Pill, White Pill
We’ve all seen The Matrix and the options available when we encounter something that breaks our reality. We know about red pills and blue pills. Many may have even taken one. Fewer know about black pills and white pills. Fewer still have taken those. Fewest of all have dared take them all at once. This four-drug cocktail is what we here at Sudo-Intellectual call the clear-pill.
This clear pill is made from equal parts radical liberalism, reactionary conservativism, naive optimism, and fatal nihilism. It’s not your grandpa’s milquetoast centrism, but rather a mix of both the enlightened and radical varieties. These varieties of pragmatic centrism reach a dynamic balance from the oscillation of a pendulum between the various extremities of creative thought and ideological belief around a pragmatic and realistic core.
Going Clear
Here at Sudo-Intellectual we act as a safe and secure color pill recycling plant, engaging with anyone based on the pill color they come in with. We hear them out and understand where they’re coming. Still, we respectfully push back and point out flaws in their thinking while finding a deeper level of discussion where disagreements can be understood productively. This process of gradually helping them see and engage with opposing viewpoints in good faith channels the angst and energy that led them to their color pill in the first place to taking the clear pill and making positive contributions that build up rather than tearing down.
At the end of the day, the clear pill is seeing our mish-mash of interconnected societal systems for what they are– people, myself included, using their values, knowledge, and experience to make the best of their situations for themselves and the people they love, be them family, friends, or distant strangers.
Sudo-Intellectual and Me
My personal dose of the clear pill led me to a way of thinking about these systems and the people who make them in a way that’s both radically ambitious and minutely practical. Sudo-Intellectual is half imagining what could be if we could build society from scratch with the same people, technology, tools, and relationships and half thinking through what we can do today in practice to make that pseudo-society just a little more possible through whether through reframing thought, engaging in conversation, or taking actions that nudge us a little more up the adaptive peak of society.
Right Brain Temple <> System 1 Dojo
Renowned psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist makes a pseudo-diagnosis of society in his book Master and His Emissary as being overly left-brain dominant, resulting in unknowingly doing a lot of things that don’t serve a clear or higher purpose. Iain labels this brain state the emissary, as its purpose is to implement what the deliberate and conscious right-brain, or master as Iain calls it, determines to be the most valuable and worthy thing to do or think at any one time. The master being the servant of the emissary in this way has negative effects for an individual, a group, and a society if there is no space to step back and take in this big picture.
Daniel Kahneman echoes this sentiment by noting the fast, automatic, intuitive system 1 thinking the left brain does well is not useful or effective for complex problem-solving. The slow, deliberate, creative system 2 thinking the right brain excels at, on the other hand, does a much better job at thinking holistically and in systems for solving the types of problems we face in society today. The only downside is that it’s a difficult, intentional, and slow process, at least at first.
Sudo-Intellectual and You
While writing Sudo-Intellectual is, at its core, a solitary endeavor, I sincerely hope you’ll take a break from your labors to join me for a portion of the journey. Sudo-intellectual acts as a sort of hybrid between a mountaintop temple for training the right brain-master in holistic system-2 thinking and a remote dojo for training the left-brain emissary in the system-1 thinking to effectively execute the insights from the master.
This hybrid training regimen with instructions from the best guest sages and senseis I can find or you can recommend will engage the right brain in slow and deliberate observation and imagination of how society's complex systems work together both for good and for ill. This perspective-taking and sense-making done in isolation from day-to-day concerns will not only help me write up my pie-in-the-sky ideas for pseudo-reform, but also make it possible for some crumbs, a slice, or even a whole pie at some point to come falling down to earth for you to catch. And worst case scenatio, you’ll have a chance to lob a tomato at yours truly, the court jester and motley fool.
Tying it All Together
The journey from thinking of these silly pseudo-reforms that would get you laughed out of the boardroom to distilling them into highly practical and implementable solutions that will get you put in charge of the program is, by nature, collaborative and participatory.
Sudo-Intellectual is losing the loop on this process for just one good idea for a sudo-solution has become a life narrative of sorts for me, and I sincerely hope that breaking silos, combining concepts, thinking globally, acting locally, and planning over both the longest and shortest time horizons will inform your life narrative as well.
Just as Sudo-Intellectual embraces those dualites by being both a pseudo and aspiring sudo-intellectual, the clear pills we dispense contain a duality all their own. Depending on your individual life circumstances when you encounter us, your pill may simply open your mind to new ways of seeing the world or spark your own long and fulfilling journey to embracing the title of Sudo-Intellectual. Which it will be I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Please leave your comments, both good and bad, so I can feed off the dialogue. I can only see within my limited perspective, so getting a peak at yours is extremely valuable. Don’t forget to tune in next Friday for a look into Just Who I Think I Am and Just What I Think I’m Doing here.