The act of taking your current idea/belief/opinion Very Seriously, reifying it, acting as if it is definitely true and must be acted on, thinking about all the implications of it, thinking about how people who donât agree are wrong, etc
So, when Iâm being a Kegan 4 dumbass, I am totally "blended with" my special Kegan 4 worldview (or perhaps, I am currently foregrounding and reifying/deifying one single value, for example âI must become more sociableâ).
This is the subject/object thing that Kegan talks about: when youâre âsubject toâ the thing, itâs holding you, and youâre not even aware of it. Youâre like a fish in water.
So, blended with this axiom, believing it to be true, you then have all these implications that you need to figure out and stress out about. âBecause I definitely Need To Become More Sociable, I need to do xyzâ. âBecause I definitely Need To Live In The Perfect Country, I need to figure a bunch of stuff outâ
And you may spend years in a particular world-view, with people who agree with you, investigating the implications of the world view - AI safety is a salient example to me, but of course any career would apply. Finding people who share your axioms, learning (getting ""Aâsâ), being able to talk to people at the same level of abstraction (having the prerequisite âBâ floor), etc.
Yes for sure this isnât a brand new thing that Iâm inventing
Scrunching is my own signifier that is pointing at some thing in the territory
I like how this does require you to think about parts, itâs just either, youâre scrunched or unscrunched
Really itâs the same as Keganâs subject/object. But saying Iâm âcurrently subject to my worldviewâ is way less memetically fit (?) than saying âoh shit Iâve been scrunchedâ
2026-02-03
You scrunch many times per day
E.g., you have an idea for something that a coworker could do, you scrunch with how important this thing is for them to do, how useful itâd be for the team, so you write a message from that headspace
Vs, unscrunching, stepping back and seeing it from other POVs, wondering if it can wait, be batched into a synchronous IRL conversation with other topics, whether maybe itâs not worth sharing it all
You scrunch into the annoyance of the first aid course taking 7 hours because the facilitator tells stories and jokes rather than being efficient. You scrunch with annoyance at how silly it is that passing a 15-question do-it-as-many-times-as-you-need multiple choice quiz qualifies you for 3 years. You scrunch with the recognition that itâs ultimately just a legal/compliance thing. Etc