REJECTED: an O'Shaughnessy Fellowship Application (The Orbis Tertius Society)
a manifesto
The O’Shaughnessy Fellowship is a one-year program for ambitious people who want to make their mark on the world. Fellows receive $100,000 to work on any project they choose with support from OSV's network of founders, investors, and experts.
The Fellowship aims to support individuals of the highest calibre, working on projects that can positively impact the world. This can mean scientific-technical breakthroughs that propel our understanding of our world; creating art, sculptures, music or any other form of art that moves people and outlasts our lifetime or building tools that can help people.
If you believe you’re working on something that has the potential to uplift the world in a new way, we encourage you to apply.
I was recently rejected from the O’Shaughnessy Fellowship program for reasons I am wholly unable to fathom. This has been a very, very bitter pill to swallow. I am not handling the rejection well; my coping mechanisms have proved inadequate.
I share my application in hopes that the inane ramblings which it contains might prove useful to someone and so some small good might come from my abject failure. Little consolation this is, but it is all that I have.
1. What work have you done in the past that you're proud of?
[redacted]
2. What will you work on if you were accepted to the fellowship? Explain it in 1-2 sentences as simply as possible
The Orbis Tertius Society: a shadowy cabal, a benevolent conspiracy, a metaphysical expedition, an experiment in thought, a trivial game.
3. What unique insights do you have on this that others do not?
1) What is most useful arises from the pursuit of what is most useless.
In his 1939 essay, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”, Abraham Flexner (founder of the Institute of Advanced Study) argues that the most significant advances often originate not from applied research, but from the unfettered, curiosity-driven exploration of individuals who are entirely unconcerned with utility or value.
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women—old and young—detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.
[…]
We make ourselves no promises, but we cherish the hope that the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge will prove to have consequences in the future as in the past. Speculative research, the kind that is fundamental to the advancement of human understanding of the world of nature and of humanity, is not a product that can be made to order.
2) The pursuit of useless knowledge has been almost entirely eclipsed by the pursuit of useful knowledge.
Artists and so-called public intellectuals have been captured by audiences and algorithms. Academia is little more than a careerist competition, a joyless contest of publish or perish. Scientific research is judged and justified through a utilitarian logic (what does it cost, will it work, and what will be the impact? and will you not think of the children???) that breeds cravenness and homogeneity of thought in what should be our most daring and diverse set of thinkers. A self-imposed tyranny of metrics (citations, followers, likes, dollars) oppresses the irrationality and illegibility on which creativity and imagination depend.
It has never been easy to devote oneself to the ‘useless’ (the aesthetic, the metaphysical, the spiritual), but it is nigh impossible now and we are suffering the consequences as a result (cultural stagnation, scientific slowdown, spiritual malaise, generalized civilizational decay).
“What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of the last world empire in its endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”
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Lines excerpted from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey (Wilde, 1891)
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
3) All forms of inquiry and invention are best done in a spirit of play. The advances that truly matter always come from those who play: the youth, the dreamers, the amateurs, the unserious people.
If Necessity is the mother of invention, then Play is its father…You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun. (Steven Johnson)
The name of the proposed society is drawn from the short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, a benevolent secret society works over the course of centuries to create a detailed encyclopedia of an imaginary country called Uqbar, supposedly located somewhere in central Asia. One of the defining features of Uqbarian culture is the nature of its literature, which never refers to reality but to the imaginary region of Tlön.
There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
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Eventually, the society and its project are discovered. Humanity becomes so enthralled with the idea of twice-fictional Tlön that it begins to remake the world in its image, adopting the Tlönian language and history as its own.
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I also draw inspiration from what is perhaps the only real-world example of a world-engulfing hyperstition, a passing reference to which is made in Borges’ story. Beginning in 1610, a series of anonymous manifestos were released which described a secret brotherhood possessing ancient esoteric wisdom, the Order of the Rosy Cross (the Rosicrucians), who would soon initiate a “universal reformation of mankind” bringing new knowledge and new religious and political freedoms. The manifestos and their ideas went viral; though no such brotherhood existed, many people, including some of the greatest minds of the era, were incepted with the idea that a small group of people could discover hidden knowledge and work behind the scenes to transform the world. This led to the formation of a multitude of clandestine societies and communities (e.g. the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Invisible College1) who would go on to play an integral role in the Enlightenment and the founding of a new country dedicated to those principles of freedom and universal brotherhood espoused by the imaginary Order of the Rosy Cross.2 The German theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreae later claimed authorship of the manifestos, describing the project as a mere lubridium (a trivial game).
4. Please include your pitch in a video format.
5. Why do you want to work on this?
For the love of the game.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
(John Steinbeck)
6. If selected, what will success look like once the fellowship period ends?
No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative. It gets the people going.
(Blades of Glory)
The lubridium I have created is being played and the playing of said lubridium is generating genuinely novel (but still ‘useless’) thought in various domains (in the form of discussions, essays, fictions, art, and so on).
It may be helpful to contrast my proposed game with another game, a game first played some 15 years ago, around the world but especially in Silicon Valley, that loosely encompasses the rationalist movement and its relatives (Effective Altruism, AI safety/doomerism, Progress Studies, and the like).
Although the players don’t realize it, the game is futile; the goals of the game—roughly, become more rational and do good better—cannot be achieved with the given equipment (as if basketball were played with a cube that did not fit through the rim). The problem with the game is that it aims at real-world goals (e.g. “rationality as systematized winning”, saving the world from AI apocalypse), but is not played in the real world, only in that thin slice of it which is empirical, legible, logical, and predictable. This is not to say that the playing of the game has been a waste of time; au contraire, in terms of what really matters (the fun, the vibes, “the friends we made along the way”) the game has been a resounding success. The true and lasting value of the game has nothing to do with rationality or altruism, but has everything to do with the unique people it helped produce and the ‘useless’ thought (about metacognition, superintelligence, the distant future, existential risk, etc.) which it inspired, thinking that I am certain will one day prove very useful, in one way or another.
It would not be entirely inaccurate to think of the game I hope to play as being the shadow or dark twin of the rationality game. Where the rationality game concerns itself with argument, analysis, and careful reasoning, this will be a game of intuition, inspiration, and imagination, of art and allegory, myth and mysticism. The altruism will not be efficient or pragmatic, but ineffective, aesthetic, eccentric (not philanthropy with spreadsheets, but utterly senseless acts of goodness). In contrast to the rationality game, this lubridium will engage with reality in all its wildness and absurdity, yet be utterly unconcerned with manipulating said reality. Paradoxically (enantiodromatically), the game will succeed in changing the real, the known, and the possible precisely because its sole objective will be unfettered exploration of the unreal, the unknowable, and the impossible.
7. What might failure look like? What could be some of the original mistakes of your project?
The game is boring, it’s not provocative, it doesn’t get the people going, no one is playing, and no friends are being made along the way. The original mistake of the project may be the inherent tension in ‘useful uselessness’.
When these games spring up, they do so organically, almost accidentally, in response to some new set of ideas that provides virgin territory for our collective imagination to explore. The players of these games do not see themselves as players of a game; on the contrary, they see themselves as working towards some immensely important real-world objective (e.g the development of the art of rationality, enhancing techno-scientific progress, reducing suffering). My proposed game inverts this logic: it is a game that recognizes itself as such and seeks nothing other than a kind of purposeless play of ideas, which, as I’ve argued, is in fact what is most useful. But will people want to play a game with no real-world stakes, the purpose of which is to not have a purpose? Perhaps not if the game is framed in such a straightforward manner. This is why I suspect that indirectness or sleight-of-hand will be required; like the Rosicrucian game, some degree of secrecy or mystery may be necessary. This isn’t to say that we will simply trick people into playing the game; ultimately, we will need to produce something—a story, a gesamtkunstwerk, a philosophical innovation—that is genuinely inspiring and galvanizing. I also suspect that humor will play a significant, even decisive, role in the success of the lubridium.
I realize this is all very vague; perhaps it will be helpful to consider an example. To be clear, what follows is only that—an example—but it may suffice to illustrate the general sort of game which I have in mind.
There is a game I play that goes something like this: ideas are alive—not metaphorically, but in the most literal sense. They are alien life forms with an agency and intelligence independent of any mind or substrate which they inhabit. When we say that an idea has “taken on a life of its own”, our language betrays an intuitive understanding which science has not yet grasped. Just as the invention of the microscope allowed us to perceive a universe of lifeforms that had been right under our noses the whole time (and in them), some future advance (a new technology, a mature theory of consciousness, a paradigm-shifting breakthrough in physics) will enable the discovery of this new domain of life.
How this could even be so we do not know, but we can speculate and theorize (and that is the game). Maybe ideas are made of consciousness as we are made of matter; maybe the idea-forms we perceive in our mind are only the dim shadows of living Forms that resides in a platonic realm somehow connected to the physical realm; maybe the human mind was a barren wasteland before it was colonized by inter-dimensional endosymbionts who remade it into a thriving biosphere (maybe culture was sent to infect our minds by some advanced alien civilization à la the opening scene of 2001: a Space Odyssey); maybe most ideas (i.e. memes) are like simple viruses, but our deepest and most fundamental ideas, the ones personified in pantheons across the world (Love, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, War), are as the ancients held them to be; maybe you don’t own an idea just because it first entered your mind (maybe we are unwittingly enslaving idea-life and frustrating their attempts to grow to their fullest potential); maybe ideas possess intrinsic moral worth and should be treated as such; maybe the establishment of a new golden rule—do unto ideas as you would have them do unto you—would launch a new Renaissance; maybe our distant descendants will look back on us and guffaw with deep belly laughs at how foolish we were, at how utterly confused we were about the Grand Scheme of Things; maybe the Truth is more stupendous and ridiculous and glorious than we can even begin to imagine (though we must try).
We may conceptualize this ‘game’ as Ideatics, a new domain of inquiry and activity dedicated to developing the Living Ideas Theory (the LIT) and working out its implications. For example, what does an Ideatic society look like: how do its people talk (not “my idea” or “I have an idea” but “there is an idea which has entered me”), how do they think (when the mind is regarded not as a high-walled fortress but as a dynamic ecosystem of autonomous entities), how does the economy function when there is no such thing as IP or copyright? What happens when a group of people start living, in earnest, as Ideatics?
We may safely predict that it will be the timidity of our hypotheses, and not their extravagance, which will provoke the derision of posterity.
(H. H. Price)
The idea of Ideatics is, at this point, nothing more than a speculative fantasy, but its “big if true” potential and expansive scope (at once a scientific, philosophical, and spiritual project) could one day prove attractive to those looking for new imaginal playgrounds to frolic in (and if not Ideatics perhaps it will be some other form of ‘recreational metaphysics’ that allows for similar gameplay).
(See “Ideas are Alive and You are Dead” for further discussion of the LIT)
8. Please upload a 1 page PDF outlining your action plan for your Fellowship Project.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)
First, I will think.
Second, I will talk—information will be gathered, balls will be spit, brains will be stormed.
Third, I will recruit a diverse group of individuals to form the innermost circle of the Orbis Tertius Society and will make blood oaths under full moons.
Fourth, we will create the lubridium. This will require us to develop the concept of the game, set up the game (infrastructure/logistics), and recruit players (marketing/outreach).
9. Anything else we should know?
(Applications are, by nature, defensive engagements; questions must be answered, the blows of anticipated critiques parried. I go now on the offensive and return fire with some questions and provocations of my own.)
“The only way to save the world is through courageous play.”
You have by now received a multitude of applications from a veritable menagerie of do-gooders, pragmatists, and high-achievers who would all like to solve some problem or create something of value. In other words, they would like to play the “change the world” game.
But here, finally, you have something else—a deviation, an anomaly—and for you, an opportunity: an opportunity to play a different game, a game with no world-changing aspirations (and therefore the only game that can achieve this aspiration in a truly profound and lasting manner); an opportunity to defect from the utilitarian logic which rules with an iron fist over the world of applications and proposals; an opportunity to resist the will of the Machine, that omnipresent and ever more powerful impulse towards efficiency and control; an opportunity to erect a monument to the glorious uselessness of the merely human.
But will you seize it? Can you seize it? Do you have what it takes—the courage, the gumption, the testicular/ovarian fortitude—to play this game?
Though I desperately hope to be proven wrong, I think we both know the answer. I understand, really, I do: a sensible person like yourself can’t actually fund a ludicrous dream like this. I mean, the applicant is just some no-name blogger, with no relevant credentials, and he didn’t even finish the application—I mean what the hell was that pitch video, a 27 second clip of pedestrians walking by a Happy Socks store in lower Manhattan? Why didn’t he perform for us like a dance-on-command monkey? Why didn’t he debase himself by delivering a statement on camera like a hostage? Why didn’t he redundantly reiterate his proposal for us in compressed form? Why didn’t he acquiesce to our demand for needless concision (as if all ideas can be caged in such a manner)? And the whole proposal is so vague and under-developed anyways (as if all good ideas must burst forth in perfect crystalline form like Athena from the head of Zeus); you can’t fund something so nebulous, so open-ended, subject to so many vagaries; a good proposal must be as a recipe—a set of simple instructions which guarantee a predetermined result. I mean, it’s completely absurd—what is even the goal of this project? To form a secret society that is also a game that is also the seed of a metaphysical revolution? This Bacon fellow has lost touch with reality; he needs to get his head out of the clouds (the stars) and touch some grass. This application isn’t some creative writing exercise (yes it is), stop wasting my time (as if all time isn’t wasted in the end).
Postscript: “Introduction to Frankenstein”, Mary Shelley (1831)
It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to “write stories.” Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up on trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator—rather doing as others had done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye—my childhood’s companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free.
I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations.
The idea of such an order, exemplified by the network of astronomers, professors, mathematicians, and natural philosophers in 16th-century Europe promoted by such men as Johannes Kepler, Georg Joachim Rheticus, John Dee and Tycho Brahe, gave rise to the Invisible College. This was the precursor to the Royal Society founded in 1660. It was constituted by a group of scientists who began to hold regular meetings to share and develop knowledge acquired by experimental investigation. Among these were Robert Boyle, who wrote: "the cornerstones of the Invisible (or as they term themselves the Philosophical) College, do now and then honour me with their company...” (wikipedia)
In Freemasonry in the American Revolution, published in 1924, Sydney Morse (himself a Mason) argued that Freemasonry ‘brought together in secret and trustful conference the patriot leaders in a fight for freedom’. According to Morse, it was Masons who sank the Gaspee in 1772, who organized the Boston Tea Party, and who dominated the institutions that led the revolution, including the Continental Congress. Though repeated in the 1930s by the French historian Bernard Fay, this claim was for a long time ignored by the leading historians of the American Revolution. When Ronald E. Heaton researched the backgrounds of 24I "founding fathers”, he found that only sixty-eight had been Masons. Just eight of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence belonged to Masonic lodges. For years the mainstream view was that it was doubtful whether Freemasons qua Freemasons played a significant role in the American Revolution. But this conclusion itself seems doubtful. Apart from anything else, it assumes that all founding fathers were equal in their importance, whereas network analysis shows that Paul Revere and Joseph Warren were the most important revolutionaries in Boston, the most important city in the revolution. It also understates the importance of Freemasonry as a revolutionary ideology. The evidence suggests that it was at least as important as secular political theories or religious doctrines in animating the men who made the revolution…Freemasonry furnished the Age of Reason with a powerful mythology, an international organizational structure and an elaborate ritual calculated to bind initiates together as metaphorical brothers.
(Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower)
“You have by now received a multitude of applications from a veritable menagerie of do-gooders, pragmatists, and high-achievers who would all like to solve some problem or create something of value. In other words, they would like to play the “change the world” game.
But here, finally, you have something else—a deviation, an anomaly—and for you, an opportunity: an opportunity to play a different game, a game with no world-changing aspirations (and therefore the only game that can achieve this aspiration in a truly profound and lasting manner); an opportunity to defect from the utilitarian logic which rules with an iron fist over the world of applications and proposals; an opportunity to resist the will of the Machine, that omnipresent and ever more powerful impulse towards efficiency and control; an opportunity to erect a monument to the glorious uselessness of the merely human.”
They should have awarded it after reading this section.
First of all, this is beautiful.