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Has been so long since I've heard the story of Bhasmasura, I forgot it existed. Really good tale to pick; complete exemplar of the role the divine, as feminine, plays in putting uncontrolled ambition/power in check –– through craftiness and allure, not confrontation. The asura leads himself to his own downfall through ungrounded desire. Shiva calls in Vishnu because the former knows the latter can tackle the problem with subtlety and play. Some conflicts are best resolved with ingenuity rather than brute force. Agency is knowing which to deploy when; a fundamentally interdependent collaboration, even within the auspicious machinations of God.

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Woof. At once undigestible and so I have to live with it while it assimilates into me not-me while I keep, walking. Thank you for all this food!

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I enjoyed reading this, though I have to admit it is mostly over my head. I have no facility with the poetic and am limited to what's more concrete. So, let me ask two questions to try to understand.

1. Do you think there's any inborne, natural temperament or personality traits involved here? You seem to describe agency as something that must be cultivated or taught, and while you state that the proper method for inculcating this is variable depending on a person's individual, I can't tell if you think there's also a sort of inherent temperamental capacity. In other words, if someone was never encouraged or cultivated in this capacity, is it impossible they would develop agency on their own? Or the other way around...if someone were naturally headstrong and stubborn, but raised in a family and society dedicated to making them obey and repressing those characteristics, would it work? I suppose I have generally assumed agency to be the result of a surplus of confidence in one's own thoughts and capacity for achieving one's own ends, such that one simply disregards the opinions of most others.

2. Does your definition of agency require that it is put to positive or productive ends? I somewhat get that sense, though you don't say it. But for example, is a serial killer who gets away for decades or maybe their whole life with murdering people agentic? It seems to me that they are. All of society and everyone they've ever known has told them it's bad and not acceptable to kill people. They decide they don't care, they want to murder people anyway, and then go and do it. Is that agentic in your opinion or is it not bc it indicates being insane in some way?

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Appreciate your questions as always, Kate! Let me try to answer them-

1. It is definitely a combination of both your natural inclinations and your upbringing but not exactly in the capacity to have agency(or not), but in the *how* of achieving it. The reason I often deliberately avoid making the nature-nurture distinction is that they are ultimately on the same möbius strip, only seen from different angles. And on a long enough time-scale, they are both downstream of people’s values. There isn’t much of a chance of my words directly changing anyone’s nature or the environment they’ve grown up in, but it might budge someone’s values, which would hopefully do the trick down the road.

I see agency as the meta-principle here- it is an acceptance of your nature and the environment that you grew up in(which often is just as “predefined” as your nature is), your own decisions throughout your life and the position it all has landed you in. As far fetched as it sounds to so many people these days, I believe that it is possible to own up to all of those things, even the ones that you did not deliberately choose for yourself, and to become accountable for yourself and your choices.

The way that you describe agency is certainly one way that all this can present itself in someone’s behavior, although even there the appearance can be deceiving. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that ostentatious achievements and appearing confident is the only kind of niche where personal agency is accepted in any capacity nowadays. Certainly, being agentic can get you both of those things but just as often people that are a slave to some emotion, trauma, or just being forced into it by circumstance also end up looking highly confident and successful to the casual observer. Even in that niche, so many people’s successes seem to paint them into a corner, why is that? Once whatever one is supposed to want in one’s place has been achieved, there isn’t anywhere to go but to try and achieve things that *you* want. People that have never even asked themselves what they really want are hardly agentic enough to know what to do with their successes at that point. I think that this kind of misunderstanding is definitely part of why we have so many unagentic people. It isn’t in the “what”, but the “how”(sometimes also the “why”)- in the short term that doesn’t make a difference but it all becomes absolutely catastrophic on a long enough time scale.

2. To sort of reiterate the point above, some serial killers definitely are very agentic but I don’t think all of them are. I would say that most people, when they have agency, do not decide to do anything as insane as becoming a serial killer, some can and do, but that doesn’t mean that agency necessarily entails positive or productive ends. It generally seems to in practice, but definitely not in any absolute terms.

Since you are a lawyer, I wonder- do you think it actually does any good to hold people legally accountable when they refuse the accountability for themselves? Does it ever teach them to be better in the future? How about the other way round, being excused when they knew they were at fault? Does it make them relieved or cynical?

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Thank you for this article. Though I've seen much written on the subject, I haven't come across the idea that a final utopia is by default stagnant/masculine and the conflict with the feminine creation/destruction if I'm reading it correctly.

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What’s the first image in this piece please?

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It is AI generated. A representation of the story of Bhasmasura.

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Long

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Hilarious

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Oct 26
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In my opinion, true agency necessitates the ability to correctly gauge when/where it is appropriate to build and crystallize things that decay over time and when/where it is appropriate to sow the infinite potential to leave something unbounded for the future.

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