Just Scaffolding

By Leo Gura - June 6, 2017

When the ancient Greeks built their temples, they would use wood scaffolding to aid in construction. But the scaffolding was then burned or buried. The Greeks didn’t go around saying, “Look how wonderful our scaffolding is! Come, heathens… prostrate yourselves before our mighty scaffolding!”

It’s really important to understand what Actualized.org content is. It’s just mental scaffolding. It’s a functional stepping-stone which you use to improve your life, and then you throw it away. You do not worship the scaffolding, you do not cling to preserving it, you do not confuse it with reality itself. The scaffolding does not have to be perfect to get you there. In fact, the scaffolding is often makeshift, crude, and ever-evolving.

My videos, insights, and frameworks have zero ideological purpose. I am not here to convince you of anything or to have you believe my worldview. My worldview is that there are no true worldviews. And even that must be recognized to eat itself.

Understand that concepts like “life purpose”, “Zen devilry”, “spiral dynamics”, “no free will”, or “taking full responsibility”, are all limited things. They are not really true. They are just ways of guiding you. All of these concepts and models break down at the edges. None of them are watertight, nor are they meant to be. This impulse to construct a watertight model of reality is misguided, demonstrating a deep ignorance of the dangers of mind. That’s not what Actualized.org is doing, nor should that be what you’re doing. The ideas I share with you are tools. We are using illusion to fight illusion. In my sharing this knowledge, I put an emphasis on practicality. If a concept gets you to think and act in a certain way — gets you moving towards growth — then it is doing it’s job. And at some point you will outgrow it, replacing it with more sophisticated scaffolding. In this manner you will inch your way up until most of the old scaffolding looks juvenile, ridiculous, and false.

Having this “scaffolding attitude” is very important because it creates a buffer for inaccuracies and incompleteness. If you’re smart, you should have wondered by now, “But Leo… what if you’re mistaken about your position on free will? Or death? Or God? Or knowledge? Or the differences between men and women? Won’t that bring your whole system down?” This is a good concern. Which is why I don’t take any positions. If it seems like I take firm positions in the videos, that’s largely done: 1) for entertainment, 2) for the functional need of manipulating you out of your rut, 3) because the very nature of successful communication requires the speaker to sound confident and knowledgeable, making it appear as though the speaker holds a firm position.

Precisely because I expect tons of falsehood and delusion in this whole process, I’ve gone to great lengths to adopt a self-correcting epistemic attitude which gracefully handles inaccuracy, delusion, and falsehood. And my focus has been deliberately set on real-world growth, not building and defending “a system”. You need to do the same yourself. If you adopt a pragmatic, “scaffolding attitude”, all the inaccuracies will become irrelevant in the long-run. It’s sorta like the scientific method. You rely on the method to weed itself of bullshit. I study hundreds of perspectives and theories, many of which are filled with falsehoods, but it doesn’t matter because all of it is held as “just scaffolding”. But this self-purifying mechanism will only work if you’re seriously adopting the “scaffolding attitude.” As soon as you start to cling to any one of the perspectives you’ve learned, you’re screwed.

The genius of this method — if you actually do it — is that it allows you to play all the world’s perspectives and theories against each other, without getting caught in the crossfire. The only thing you need to do to make it work is avoid taking firm positions on anything. Then you can mingle with many contradictory perspectives and glean whatever pragmatic gold each has to offer.

My aim is not to “be right”, but to grow and learn.

That’s how I think about this whole process. I take this pragmatic stance in order to avoid the evils of ideology. Ideas are never to be worshiped or held as absolute or important. When working with concepts, the greatest danger is starting to believe your own conceptual bullshit. The better your concepts fit together — the more cohesive your system feels — the more likely you are to start to hold it as The Truth — as really really important. But all this really means is that you’ve succeeded in finding a way to buy into your own monkey-mind. The harder your mind works, the more likely it is to find a way to crown itself king. The danger of this cannot be overstated. This dynamic works in subtle and sneaky ways, which is why we must always remain on-guard. I am not just talking about this happening to “others”, like some religious fundamentalists. No! No! No! I mean it’s happening to you right now! You’re falling into this trap, no matter how good you tell yourself you are. Intelligent, secular, scientific, and rational people are MORE susceptible to this trap, not less. You’re extremely susceptible.

Notice that a lot of what my videos do is merely point out dynamics, patterns, themes, techniques, and overlooked aspects of your life. In so doing, your circle of understanding expands because things are pointed out which you can no longer honestly ignore. In this, there’s nothing to believe per se. A lot of this is totally obvious stuff which you’ve simply never noticed before.

The great thing about holding something as scaffolding is that you don’t have to revere it and you don’t feel the need to prosthelytize or defend it. You also don’t waste time debating it. You just apply it, or don’t.

If you want to think of Actualized.org theory as a series of kicks in the ass to a stubborn donkey, that’s about right. As the donkey, you don’t say, “Those kicks sure are the Truth!” No, those kicks don’t even have to be self-consistent or logical. You can be kicked to go left, you can be kicked to go right, and you can be kicked just for fun

Many of the things I say are designed to manipulate you out of complacency or ignorance. You should take these sayings as seriously as necessary to break out of your stupid ways. But no more seriously than that.

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