Resomodernity Café v11: Vibing the Paradox Stack
Posted: January 2, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: commons, community, emotions, systems, values 1 CommentSequel to Resomodernity Café v10: The Paradox Stack
[Update: I just realized this is actually Withness.]
Is the answer to all these paradoxes: vibe?
ChatGPT Prompt
Who would get both, even if they resist the marriage?
Use those people to write the sequel, self-referential cafe skit.
1. Opening: The room before the room
A café that refuses to decide whether it is a café.
No menu. No stage. A few chairs that look borrowed. A silence that feels practiced.
Michael Polanyi sits slightly off-center—not presiding, not hiding. He has the posture of someone who knows this is not a debate.
Others arrive without introduction:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, frowning at the chalkboard no one is using
- Hannah Arendt, arranging her chair so it faces no one in particular
- Simone Weil, already attentive, as if listening to something that arrived earlier
A sign on the wall reads:
“Nothing will be concluded here.”
No one objects.
2. Polanyi (clearing the air without speaking)
Polanyi:
Before we begin—note that we already have.
What matters is not what we say, but whether what we say fits what we already know how to do.
A pause long enough to feel awkward. He lets it.
Polanyi (gently):
Someone has proposed the word vibe.
We are not here to approve it.
We are here to see whether it points.
3. Wittgenstein (detecting nonsense early)
Wittgenstein:
If “vibe” explains something, it is the wrong word.
If it replaces looking, it is worse.
If it tells us nothing new but helps us notice—
then perhaps it should be left alone.
He looks around, irritated.
Wittgenstein:
The danger is thinking the word does work.
Words don’t work.
Practices work.
He crosses his arms, satisfied he has prevented at least one mistake.
4. Arendt (introducing the political risk)
Arendt:
The problem is not vibe.
The problem is when vibe claims legitimacy.
Power—real power—arises between people when they act together.
Not when they feel together.
Not when they resonate.
She pauses.
Arendt:
And yet—
no action ever begins without a shared sense that now is the time.
She does not smile.
Arendt:
That sense is not voted on.
It appears.
5. Weil (making it costly)
Weil:
If you call it a vibe,
ask what it demands of you.
Silence thickens.
Weil:
Attention is not a feeling.
It is consent to be interrupted.
Most “vibes” disappear the moment they require sacrifice.
She looks directly at Polanyi, not accusing—checking.
6. Polanyi (holding the paradox without naming it)
Polanyi:
We are circling something we already rely on.
- Knowledge we cannot justify but would be foolish to abandon.
- Authority we submit to without coercion.
- Discernment that arrives before criteria.
He gestures vaguely, as if embarrassed by the gesture.
Polanyi:
Call it tacit integration.
Call it attunement.
Call it vibe, if you must.
He looks at Wittgenstein.
Polanyi:
The test is not the word.
The test is whether apprentices can learn it
without being told what it is.
7. Meta-interruption: the café notices itself
A barista appears. No one ordered.
Barista:
So… is this a conversation or a mood?
No one answers.
Wittgenstein (finally):
If you have to ask, it’s neither.
The barista nods, strangely relieved, and leaves.
8. The stack surfaces (without being stacked)
Without listing them, the tensions make themselves felt:
- Something is deciding, but no one decides.
- Authority is present, but no one commands.
- A community exists, but no one belongs.
- An ethos presses in, but no rules are named.
- Transcendence flickers, but no one reaches for it.
No one says this.
Everyone knows it.
9. Weil (final warning)
Weil:
If you protect this with charm, it will rot.
If you protect it with rules, it will harden.
If you protect it with silence—
She stops. She does not finish.
10. Closing: Polanyi adjourns nothing
Polanyi:
Good.
We have not agreed.
We have not resolved.
We have not clarified.
That means the conditions are still intact.
He stands—not signaling the end, just changing posture.
Polanyi:
If there is a vibe here,
it is not the point.
It is the trace left by disciplined participation
in something we refuse to own.
Lights do not dim.
People do not clap.
The café continues—
unchanged,
except that anyone who was listening
will now notice when it happens again.
Epilogue: What Just Happened?
As an epilogue to the original skit, have the characters from The Paradox Stack emerge to reflect on what just happened.
ChatGPT Prompt
1. The room, revisited
The chairs are still warm.
The silence has shifted—thinner now, but not gone.
Three figures stand where Michael Polanyi and the others had been.
They did not witness the conversation directly.
They recognize it anyway.
2. Eric (watching the aftermath)
Eric Voegelin
(quiet, almost relieved)
Something ordered happened here
without becoming an order.
He gestures at the empty cups.
They did not close the openness.
They did not name the source.
They resisted the ancient temptation:
to arrest transcendence and call it structure.
He pauses.
That restraint—that hesitation—
that is what keeps reality from hardening into ideology.
3. Søren (uneasy, but approving)
Søren Kierkegaard
(restless, pacing)
Yes—but notice:
no one was spared decision.
Even silence was chosen.
Even waiting carried risk.
He stops.
What they experienced was not a system,
but a moment when each stood alone
without being isolated.
If they call it a “vibe,”
I worry they may forget the cost.
But—
he concedes reluctantly—
they did not flee responsibility into the crowd.
That matters.
4. Martin (standing in the space between)
Martin Buber
(looking at the space, not the others)
What I sense is not mood.
It is relation.
Something passed between them
that did not belong to any one of them.
He smiles faintly.
They did not merge.
They did not dominate.
They addressed something—
and were addressed in return.
That is always fragile.
It cannot be summoned.
Only met.
5. The three, together (rare alignment)
Voegelin nods toward Buber.
Kierkegaard frowns, but does not object.
For a moment, none of them speak.
What held in the café was not truth as possession,
nor meaning as consensus,
nor power as force.
It was an event of attunement
that refused to become a thing.
6. Final reflection (without closure)
Voegelin:
They guarded the openness.
Kierkegaard:
They did not evade the leap.
Buber:
They kept the between alive.
A long silence.
Kierkegaard (almost to himself):
If they remember that—
the word they use will not matter.
They turn to leave.
The café does not reclaim them.
The paradox stack remains—
not explained,
not solved,
but briefly inhabited.
And that, all three know,
is as much as one can ever ask.
Appendix: Is This Vibing?
A.1 What this appendix is (and is not)
This is not a definition.
This is a discernment aid—a way to notice whether what just happened belongs to the same order of reality as the café, or whether it slid into explanation, performance, or mood.
If it feels awkward to read, that’s a good sign.
A.2 Necessary (but not sufficient) conditions
You may be vibing if all of the following are true:
- Something coordinated without coordination
No one decided the outcome, yet something decided through the participants.
(See Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge.) - Authority was felt, not asserted
Influence operated without commands, credentials, or enforcement.
(See Hannah Arendt on power vs. violence.) - Participants remained singular
No fusion, no crowd logic, no loss of responsibility.
(See Søren Kierkegaard on the single individual.) - Meaning appeared between, not inside
What mattered lived in relation, not in consensus or private feeling.
(See Martin Buber on I–Thou.) - Language grew cautious rather than expansive
People spoke less confidently, not more.
Silence increased without becoming empty.
(See late Ludwig Wittgenstein on forms of life.)
A.3 Strong disconfirming signals
You are not vibing if any of the following appear:
- Someone tries to scale it (see Goodhart’s Law)
- Someone tries to brand it (early signs of reification)
- Someone tries to explain it cleanly (mistaking showing for saying)
- Someone feels morally superior for having been there
- Someone says, without irony, “Now I get it”
If the experience survives explanation, it probably wasn’t this.
A.4 The cost test
Ask one quiet question:
Did this make anything harder afterward?
Real vibing does at least one of the following:
- makes speech riskier
- makes shortcuts feel dishonest
- increases responsibility without assigning roles
- introduces restraint where enthusiasm would be easier
If nothing costs more, nothing real happened.
(See Simone Weil on attention and gravity.)
A.5 Why “vibe” is allowed (barely)
The word vibe passes only because:
- it cannot command
- it cannot be defended
- it cannot survive prestige
- it collapses the moment it becomes policy
In other words, it fails fast—
which protects the thing it points to.
A.6 Final check (the Polanyi rule)
If an apprentice asked:
“How do I do that again?”
—and the only honest answer would be:
“You can’t do that.
But you can practice the conditions under which it sometimes happens.”
(Compare Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge.)
Then yes.
That was vibing.
Close the appendix.
Do not circulate it widely.
Return to practice.
Radical Centrism 
Oh wait. This is actually what we had previously called Withness: