Preface to the Second Edition

Five Years Later

A lot has happened in the last five years. Waypoint was written before I quit doing Theory Pleeb, exited from activism, wrote Timenergy, founded my online theory school Theory Underground and, with it, kicked off the still-ongoing international tour. It is because of those other projects that people even care about this one. That is the nature of a waypoint—why do we look at where someone was at unless we are interested in how they got to where we’ve found them?

As the author of this text, I lack access to this work “as it is” as well as to the mindset I was in when it was written. It brings back some memories. It also presents ideas, many of which were early versions of concepts that only reached maturity later. In other cases, I present things that prove absolutely foundational for my thought but that I never wrote about again publicly–-like the virtuous circle framework, or my thoughts about cancel culture. Either way, this book will prove important to anyone wanting to compare and contrast where I was from where I’ve ended up.

Now I am settling down at McKerracher Family Farm and preparing for fatherhood with my amazing wife Ann. We have a boy on the way. I just wrote a new book, spent the last 220 days developing a project that sets me up for the next twenty-five years of alternative education work, and we are making big plans for TUCON26 and CANONFEST. All of these amazing developments are the fruit of seeds planted in this book. Thanks to this work and those who supported it, I have been able to accomplish so much more than what I ever imagined.

So with all of that said, this is the preface to the 2nd edition—five years later. This begs the questions: What has changed? If I were to go back and change anything about it, what would that be? Do I have anything that demands clarification? Yes, there are a few points worth fleshing out.

First of all, Waypoint was published under the name Theory Pleeb, which was also the name of my online left influencer personality. These pieces were all written directly before, during, or nearing the end of the time in my public life that we will refer to as the Theory Pleeb era. Yet I have, five years later, chosen to retroactively assign authorship to me, David McKerracher, the author of Theory Pleeb too.

Theory Pleeb was a leftist. Any attentive reader of Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy is likely to pick up on differences—some obvious, others subtle. How much more so with my newest book? After Capture is currently in its editing phase and remains unpublished, but it marks quite the break from where I was at in Waypoint.

Five years ago, I still assumed progress comes from the left side of history, and that progress can be defined as something that supersedes tradition. Unlike liberal progressives, I assumed that progress would come from the working class, who I believed to be the only genuine vehicle driving positive social change. I resented the liberal progressive left that was doing what I now call “loser fascism.” Loser fascism could also be called reverse fascism, i.e. instead of a technocratic elite’s majoritarianism that attempts to bind together all of the movements with staying power and force into a new national movement with its own mythic unity, the progressive liberal left attempts to do the exact opposite. Via intersectional identity politics, rather than bring together majoritarian movements with staying power, liberal progressive left minoritarianism attempts to “intersect” the interests of history’s victims, i.e. to be crass, its losers. “The last shall be first” is beautiful when preached by Jesus in reference to the kingdom of heaven, but in secular progressive ideology this logic is transubstantiated into an organizing principle.

Even when I was at my most progressive-facing I did not believe in loser fascism. I thought, like so many leftists still to this day, that our only hope depended on reforming the movement made up of people who won't see or hear men unless they dress up in, or perform, feminine affect. “Like, sure, they reduce us to our race, gender expression, and sexual orientation—but if only we could get them to see that class is the ultimate basis of oppression, maybe then we could resurrect a working class movement!” This is the reason we adopted the language of intersectionality with class, the idea being that most people have it bad–-but especially people who belong to oppressed minorities, as though this framing could get good progressive liberals to demand the end of capitalism.

That was back when we thought that radicalizing normies was a good idea. Before we saw our dreams become true in the form of nightmares, when everyone and anyone now is “anti-capitalist,” by which they mean anything but what we meant. We left influencers who were useful idiots for the DIY media arm of progressive liberalism. Now I see my former colleagues lying in the bed that I helped make, lying to themselves as though enough people being anti-social will bring about the kind of progress that could harness automation or end wars. Having seen where things went since then, it looks like I got out just in time.

In Waypoint I was still left. In its original introduction, written after the other parts of the book, I gave myself five years to develop into the kind of person who would have something hopefully worth saying to the kids who would be 25 in 30 years. What I did next was quit Theory Pleeb, shut down my patreon, and choose to work at Amazon rather than continue to rely on either academia or the attention economy for my income. In December of 2022 I launched Theory Underground, the post-left theory school I wished had existed when I was burning out in 2020. This was right around the time that I wrote Timenergy, which was obstinately neither left nor right.

Now I have just written After Capture, in which I come out as Post-Duopoly. This is a position that goes beyond post-left, but not in the way commonly assumed. People think it means to be over or above the culture war entirely. As if you could have no strong feelings about pro life vs pro choice or border security. That is not the point. Many like the idea of being Post-Duopoly but they don't realize what it actually entails, which is the opposite of disavowal of really having a side. The point is to discover your fundamental attunement and its presuppositions that you hold dear, to accept them as partial to the situation without having a totalizing claim on the truth. The big feelings and hunches of one's side are not wrong, they're just captured by a duopolistic system that requires us to create the worst possible version of our opposition.

In the era of duopoly extremism your side is responsible for its Other. Left media creates the right. Right media creates the left. Both sides cherry-pick and curate the worst possible image of its opposition so as to justify itself as the lesser evil in whom all hope and energy must be vested. “When the other side is literally Hitler, anything is justified.” — Matt Taibbi.

When you get called Hitler enough, finally someone will step forward who says, “Ok fine, yes, Hitler was pretty cool actually.” Nick Fuentes was predictable. He's the result of billions spent by left-wing media hyperstitioning his success into reality. Hasan Piker does the same thing in his apologetics for Russian socialism or Chinese communism.

I do not propose that Fuentes or Hasan are anything less than genuine—I never assume bad faith on the part of media personalities or influencers. The point is that their ideas are not their own. They belong to fields. They form beliefs and make decisions within the context of the push and gravitational pull of forces, flows, polarizations that go beyond immediate empirical perception. Left and right hyperstition in the era of Duopoly Extremism create predictable positions that must be filled. Actors on the stage of history, or agents in the field of forces, eke out their positions in good faith. The assumption that the Other is a mixture of evil and stupid is a cheap way out from thinking deeply about the complexity of our deadlock. It's not just convenient, it is a road to nowhere.

The path forward will not be easy to forge, but we must take certain steps if the way is ever to be opened again. I'll touch on one here: radical responsibility, in both the political and intellectual senses. Politically, this means that if your side is the “right side,” the good guys, the ones with a disproportionate claim on the good, then you are more responsible for doing the right thing and, just as important, for not undermining your side. If the left desires the biggest changes that would impact the most people, then leftists are more responsible for how their messages are made and received, for the predictable reaction they provoke. Similarly, radical responsibility for intellectuals means that if you have more knowledge than anyone else about an issue, you don't get to lord that over others but actually are to become the servant to humanity. Everyone else works so that you can have that knowledge, well then you are responsible for showing others how they can obtain it for themselves.

Post-Duopoly radical responsibility says we must get the log out of our own eye before worrying about the speck in our brother’s eye. This starts with refusing to reduce the Other to its worst manifestations. Then the hardest step, to refuse to accept as given one's most closely held presuppositions about the true, the good, and the beautiful. Everyone knows they could be mistaken about anything, yet somehow certainty creeps back in and we find ourselves so easily reducing the Other to a totally lost cause.

Applying this radical responsibility idea to my own work, I've revisited and refined key ideas from Waypoint, starting with the core distinction between time-energy and timenergy. The whole time-energy vs timenergy distinction is something I've moved on from. It's unnecessarily confusing. Now, if I must refer to it, I just call time-hyphen-nergy “relative timenergy.”

The other issue is that I no longer think about it as timenergy vs labor power while timenergy is taken to mean something synonymous to scholé or otium. Schole and otium are not the same as timenergy, they are a way that timenergy can be qualified. Timenergy unqualified would be feral time. Timenergy qualified as labor power is alienated time, instrumentalized by the interests of others. Timenergy qualified as scholé is not something that happens “naturally” when removed from drudgery, manual labor, or other practical concerns—scholé is structured by civilizational infrastructure and cultural priors. Otium is used as synonymous to scholé but it, though containing similar meanings, expands beyond the active directed leisure of scholé to include connotations like rest. This is problematic for a variety of uniquely Roman reasons.

Notice that the Romans never produced anything that came close to the accomplishments of the Greeks, at least in the domains of philosophy and literature. I won't say Virgil was only writing Homer fanfiction, but his greatness is only intelligible when compared and contrasted to Homer, who stands on his own. Aristotle and Plato could each stand on his own, but combined they become something with which Rome could never compete. Could it be because the Romans were too political? Too imperial? Too public? Could it be that Latin simply lacks the resources afforded by Greek, as Heidegger might suggest?

I suggest that it has to do with how much their grasp of scholé was lost and replaced by otium. It's like when the bourgeoisie talks of having “leisure.” This is not the leisure of the aristocracy. The leisure of television, cruise vacations, or Disneyland are not the active leisure of pursuing the liberating arts as their own ends, as good in themselves.

Each art or science has its own end that feeds into the ultimate end of human becoming directed by eudaimonia—the special kind of pleasure that comes from sacrificing short-term pleasures for the sake of skills that develop longer-term projects that activate, rely on, and sustain the nurture of one's talents. Doing so is the stuff of scholé, which is a qualified kind of timenergy that was lost on the Romans. Never was this kind of qualified timenergy more lost on a people though than it has become for Americans, for whom “leisure” is a blasphemy to human potential. It spits in the face of philosophy, history, science, math, art, theater, music, and sports when all of the above are woven into a rich fabric of life that can be properly called uppercase Culture.

Timenergy can become labor power, scholé, or feral time, in all three cases it is habitus-forming processes that determine the difference. There are other ways that timenergy can get qualified, but we'll leave that to the side for now. Suffice it to say that these are all discoveries from the last five years since the writing of Waypoint’s Post Script on Timenergy. I'm not going to change anything in the substance of this book though. I want to honor my younger self and also leave it to the reader to compare and contrast this literal waypoint on my journey to where I go later.

I'll close this section on Timenergy and Scholé off by proposing yet another conceptual distinction. I am not sure that timenergy for all in the way it was expressed within this book is possible, or even preferable. It made people want things that they shouldn't set as serious goals. A person saying “I want my Timenergy” and “I want everyone to have their Timenergy” has multiple meanings—some of which have become clear over the last five years in ways that now I feel the need to safeguard my theory against.

Timenergy freed from labor power within our existing system is necessarily dependent on other people doing labor time so as to free up one's otium or, at best, scholé. Maybe the goal should be neo-Greco slavery, i.e. full automation, or even partial automation with some partial slavery reserved for certain classes of people. Just for fun, I give you permission to insert whatever group you like to scapegoat—it’s ok because this is like fantasy football but for political economy.

Whether the slavery be literal or figurative, I personally think the greatest issue is not the injustice of slavery, because even in a hypothetical “full automation” wherein robot justice is of no concern, there remains the more serious issue: people who don't have a practical bone in their bodies or the will to exercise and learn to do so are insufferable and, even if they might sometimes make great discoveries in, say, mathematics, this does not mean they should be trusted with responsibility, decision-making, or even influence. That's why the idea of a world of generalized scholé is not preferable.

It's also not possible. To be brief, there will always be work to do, work that robots should not do, either because it lowers the quality of the product (as in what are called “care industries”—those natural callings stolen from women and monopolized by institutions) or because we would be worse off for not doing those things ourselves. In many cases it is not desirable or plausible that we do everything ourselves, but the point would be to understand how the world works and to have a hand in the process.

Instead of reclaiming our lives from the commodity form and its institutionalization, the full automation people demand the opposite of stewardship. This is the only part of the reason I will give for now, as I have too much to say on the matter and need to close this out. My conclusion is that there is a new form of life in development that cannot be described by the old categories that belong to previous divisions of labor.

Scholé and labor power both presuppose and reify relations of production that could be moved beyond in a future where working-thinkers and thinking-workers live more deliberate and holistic lives than were possible in systems based in slavery or wage labor. We workers-with-earbuds who multitask while benefiting from the wealth of knowledge accumulated thus far can do something different than has ever been done. We can read and write and work and think in ways unintelligible to those institutional functionaries of the discursive Taylorista.

We have a whole new mode that we are pioneering, neither labor nor scholé, but scholabor. What is this mysterious third thing? Leave that for the historians to figure out. We should focus on getting after it. To that end, with all the resources made available via the audio-listening revolution and A.I., the most important missing thing becomes not access to information, but genuine communication within, across, and beyond the niches of the Post Class Fractured Mass (PCFM). This is rendered more difficult by the day as the churn produces a generalized tolerance, or numbness, towards slop.

We can always turn that slop back on itself into something noble (or at least useful) by using the tools of theory and philosophy to analyze it, but then we are just doing the thing one does when back in Plato's Cave—interpreting shadows on the wall. It's what the film school theory heads are into. That, like literary criticism, is fine. We all get enjoyment from various kinds of slop. The question though for us is this: what can we do beyond all that? How can we learn to think and organize longer-term in ways that are not going to get captured by a university department or fandom in the attention economy?

For any solution to be a real way forward it must break us out of the presentism of generational cohorts while helping us sink deep roots into the canon in a way that builds bridges across our different areas of interest or specialization. Bonus points if it simultaneously helps us remember how little we actually know while keeping our focus on the great minds, ideas, discoveries, events, and texts that, if kept fresh, enrich and inform the soil of a future worthy of the name.

After giving myself the license I did in the introduction of this book, of spending the next five years developing myself to write to the parents of the kids who will be 25 in 30 years, I now have the way I would like to begin that conversation. It's a game called Canon: The Liberal Arts Trading Card Game, or Canon; TCG for short. It's like Magic: The Gathering meets the liberal arts, but made more accessible with some Settlers of Catan mechanics.

If you are unfamiliar with these things don't worry about it, the point is that this “game” is a great example of a way to connect with people across the many areas of the liberal arts. Literature people into different periods are easily able to play with people into philosophy, science, politics, or religion. There is something for everyone to sink their roots into, from which to draw nourishment, and thereby to connect within the frame of something fun that helps us keep our sights on those great and wonderful things, people, and ideas that give us a shared basis beyond the slop.

I don't expect my game to change everything for everyone, but I have seen how much it has changed relationships for me, so I suspect many of my fellow travelers who are into philosophy and theory will, by playing this game, find a hundred new ways to connect with others while elevating the quality of those relationships. Whatever we do practically, it should build generalist bridges and sink literary roots while reaching for new theoretical heights.

I'll close by saying the goal is for Canon to be our way of interacting with a lot more people, especially deliberate parents who would otherwise have little to do with philosophy and theory but for whom alternative education is important. Theory Underground, which is how most of you know me—even though it wasn't around at the time of Waypoint’s publication—lives on as a sort of Canon After Dark operation. It's the deeper end, where we get to develop our reading, writing, and lecturing abilities. If you enjoy this book, then the chances are you’ll love Theory Underground and/or Canon: TCG.

Cheers to the next twenty-five years!

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