I’m clobbering together a conceit of the metaphysical topology of excellence in the world. It’s too much to describe in a single blog entry, but ideas are like birds of prey: the more time in open air, the better. A one-on-one discussion of this idea would start with asking what the Other wants to be good at.

Everyone has “excellences”: refined virtues of being capable and knowledgeable in some aspect of existence. The most common is excellence at being oneself– knowing how to act as oneself and respond to the behaviors this causes in others, familiarity with one’s own psychology and physiology, and the capacity to intricately detail a point of view and expectations of the future. Other excellences include the ability to argue, play chess, seduce women, program computers, and understand others. Conceiving of these as a manifold in the infinite-dimensional “excellence-space”, we are all shaped a bit like spiny tropical fruit.

Excellence is driven by interest (almost the integral of interest), which has a similar topology. People structure their lives in many ways, but one way is to pursue their interests and find situations which exploit or develop certain excellences. People fall in and out of love according to the ever morphing shape of their excellences.

Most interestingly, the topology of excellence is manifested in the structure of communities. Every community has towers of virtue: small groups of individuals drawn together by common interest and complementary excellence. Most communities have several such towers, each of which sets everyone else orbiting around their dimensional axis. For example, most communities have a social tower, a managerial tower, and a old-timer tower.

Finally, I believe that at this level, the experience of life is largely community-independent. From a distance, communities appear to exemplify certain virtues, but the actual extremes of excellence have only superficial similarities to the propounded values. In other words, the towers– the most obvious meta-personal elements of communities and the primary concern of one living in them– work pretty much the same everywhere. The differences are in the details, “feel”, and the people.