An annotated bibliography for “Knowing How to Remember”
Good Protocols SPC · Companion document · August 2026
A note on architecture
This canon is shelved by function, and the shelving is itself a discipline. The Room voices govern: they set the ontology, the tone, and the surface of everything we publish. The Structure voices are load-bearing and largely below the floor: they sharpen the diagnosis, and we cite them precisely and sparingly, because their register, however sound the analysis, can code a document into a culture war we are not fighting. The Ear voices are instrumentation only: they tell us how communication lands, and are never permitted to govern what is true or what is loved. Works marked [proposed accession] are recommended additions occasioned by this ethos paper; everything else is standing canon or in-house.
Shelf I: The Room, governing voices
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (English ed. 2019) and The Uncontrollability of the World (English ed. 2020). The ethos’s sociological spine. Resonance, being reached and reaching back, is the criterion of a good relation to world, other, and past; alienation is its muting. Uncontrollability supplies the warrant for every “at stations, never ambient” rule we keep: what is rendered fully available and administered can no longer answer back. In this paper, Rosa grounds §3’s claim that standing accusation produces a mute world.
Hartmut Rosa, Situation und Konstellation (Suhrkamp, 2026; English translation in preparation at Good Protocols). The lived moment versus the arrangement of forces: both true, and category-confusable. The ethos’s central diagnosis of present-tense resentment (meeting a person, addressing a constellation) is this distinction applied morally. Our translation and the twelve-cell rubric built on it are described in the evaluation methodology paper.
Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind (1999) and Mindsight (2010). Interpersonal neurobiology; health as integration, parts differentiated and linked. The ethos borrows integration as its working definition of integrity (§5): the honest seam, not the hidden crack and not the collapse into the wound. Siegel governs the Room jointly with Rosa; nothing in our communications practice may contradict what these two require.
Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care (2017) and Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (2020). Kintsugi, which our Theology of Formation promotes from metaphor to ontological claim, is the ethos’s image of the sincere past: breakage named in gold, vessel returned to service. Culture care versus culture war names the community-development stance of §6: feed the soil, don’t salt it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986). The hero-and-spear story requires an enemy and a wound to organize itself; the carrier-bag story organizes around what is gathered and kept alive. §6’s argument that a community narrated as a battlefield will be developed as one, and that hard history can be carried as one thing among the things carried, is Le Guin applied to planning.
Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend (2020). Emergence and rise-above: growth as what becomes possible when security needs are tended, not as the reward for rehearsed struggle. Supports §5’s claim that formation aims at the forward reach, and supplies the humanistic-psychology bridge to the resilience shelf below.
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (2016). Design posture toward one’s own life (prototype, iterate, reframe) as everyday agency practice. The quiet anti-fatalism of the canon: a person mid-design cannot simultaneously be a finished verdict.
Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas (March 18, 1968). The classic accounting of everything the official measure omits: the health of our children, the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages. Bridges the two white papers: neither a community’s worth nor its wound was ever in the dashboard.
Wendell Berry, essays (esp. The Art of the Commonplace, 2002). Membership: the community as a body one belongs to and answers to, prior to any grievance or program. Berry’s fidelity-to-place underwrites the whole idea of a landed past: history as soil to be farmed, not a court that never adjourns.
Greg Beale, We Become What We Worship (2008). The formation mechanism stated as theology: we are conformed to what we behold with devotion. §3’s hardest claim, that organized, rehearsed grievance is a formation curriculum, is Beale’s law applied outside the sanctuary.
Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (1992). [proposed accession] Belovedness as conferred, non-positional, non-rival worth, the currency that defunds the status economy rather than competing within it. Nouwen’s three lies, I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what others say about me, name the status game’s ledger four decades before the literature formalized it, in a register no one can mistake for polemic. Anchors the Interlude (“The Ladder and the Knife”) and is recommended for the Room itself, beside Thurman.
Shelf II: The Structure, diagnostic voices, load-bearing, below the floor
Cited precisely, deployed sparingly, never permitted to set the tone.
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (1987) and the trade-offs corpus. The constrained vision: systems as trade-off machines run by fallible people, not designs concealing malice. Supplies §3’s humility about institutions and §4’s discipline about disparity claims: “what is being traded against what, and who bears it?” as the replacement for “why is this still broken?”
Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (1990) and White Guilt (2006). Race-holding: the grievance retained as exemption from risk, from agency, from the present tense. The mechanism §4 names, from a writer who paid full price for naming it first. Steele also models the cost of the register: structural use only.
Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom (2001). Poverty of worldview as a transmissible condition; the vocabulary of helplessness as self-fulfilling. Clinical observation of the curriculum grievance runs, from decades in prison and hospital practice. Handle with the same care as Steele.
Rob Henderson, Troubled (2024); “luxury beliefs” essays. The diagnostic we use for §4’s cost accounting: postures that confer status on the comfortable while their operational costs are billed to the vulnerable. Henderson’s foster-care biography makes him canon rather than commentary for our sectors. His ladder-or-knife fork (Substack essays) opens the Interlude.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II. [proposed accession] The fork first drawn: zelos against phthonos, the pain at another’s good that resolves into emulation versus the pain that resolves into unmaking. Two paragraphs of Greek that the entire modern envy literature footnotes.
Max Scheler, Ressentiment (1912). [proposed accession] The chemistry of swallowed envy: repeated impotent comparison transvaluing what cannot be reached into what should be despised, sour grapes elevated into a moral system. The classical vertebra beneath the Interlude’s account of grievance as envy’s archive.
Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (1966; English 1969). The sociology: every society is governed by how it manages envy, whether through constraint institutions (concealment manners, luck-talk, evil-eye hygiene) or through entrenchment so complete the affect stops being recognized and presents itself as principle. Handling note, same class as Steele: never deployed as a solvent against claims from below; the misuse is the oldest objection to the book itself. The fruit test, not envy-diagnosis, governs every application.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961; English 1965). [proposed accession] Mimetic desire: we want through models, the model becomes the rival, and convergence manufactures the scarcity it fears. The mechanics of the RFP pile-on and of best-practice replication as mimetic desire in evaluation’s clothing; the Interlude’s funding-commons analysis and the grain test in “Knowing When Not to Measure” both stand on Girard.
Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset (2021). The symmetric razor’s officer: what’s true, at what magnitude, by what mechanism, asked with the same face toward favored and resented claims. The ethos’s epistemic discipline in one figure.
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life (2018). Order-then-beauty: the sequence claim that stabilization precedes flourishing, in rooms as in lives. Used strictly for the sequencing insight; the surrounding polemics stay outside our walls.
Shelf III: The Ear, instrumentation only
Will Storr, The Unpersuadables (2013), The Science of Storytelling (2019), The Status Game (2021), And You’ll Be Okay Forever. How belief defends itself, how narrative lands, and, decisive for §4, how grievance can become a status economy with inflationary pressure. Storr explains the mechanics of the drift this ethos names. Standing discipline, per “Reading the Grain of a Funder”: Storr governs the Ear, never the Room; he tells us how things are heard, and is not consulted on what is true or good.
Shelf IV: The archival warrant
Paul Andrew Hutton, The Apache Wars (2016) and The Undiscovered Country (2025). History without prejudice in both directions: every party a decision-maker with reasons, judgment landing on specified acts. Source of the ethos’s razor (act, actor, mechanism, magnitude) and of its proof that precision damns more effectively than indictment: Bascom, Mangas Coloradas under the flag, Miles and the scouts. The archive in which betrayal’s long half-life, and plain dealing’s, can both be read.
Shelf V: The formation floor (in-house and sources)
Good Protocols, Theology of Formation (2026, in-house). Five movements, imago Dei, Buddha-nature, epektasis, interbeing, and the logoi of Maximus, grounding one working sentence: every person carries a sound not yet fully played. Kintsugi promoted from metaphor to ontological claim. The floor under §5.
Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (4th c.). Epektasis: the person as constitutively forward-stretched. The oldest statement of the ethos’s anthropology: fixation on what lies behind as a violation of the creature’s own grain.
Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (7th c.). The logoi: each created thing carrying its intended word. Grain doctrine, ontologized: read the logos before reshaping the life.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding / the Interbeing corpus. No enemies to be found anywhere in the field of inter-arising: the metaphysical floor under “no one is scenery,” including the caseworker, including the funder.
Pa Tan, True Frequency: Finding the Sound Every Person Carries (ms., 2026). The full formation argument of which this ethos paper is the public face; threshold and recognition pieces per the three-layer publishing architecture.
Formed Otherwise corpus (2026, in-house), with Damian Milton, “the double empathy problem” (2012); Barry Prizant, Uniquely Human (2015); Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes (2015); Temple Grandin; Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies (2021); Devon Price, Unmasking Autism (2022); Monique Botha’s research. Two exports to the general ethos: benevolent supplantation, over-scaffolding as malformation generalized in §5 to treating a people as their damage, and the Double Empathy corrective in §6: misunderstanding between communities and institutions runs both directions, so one-sided deficit-mapping has failed before it starts.
Shelf VI: Community development, operative
Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience (1924) and “Constructive Conflict” (1925). Power-with; conflict as legitimate difference to be integrated, which procedurally requires persons-with-reasons and cannot run on avatars. The paper’s razor, made method.
Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development (1979). The nested levels our rubric reads, child, worker, family, and community anchor, and the reason “community development” and “formation” are one field seen at two magnifications.
John Kretzmann & John McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out (1993). [proposed accession] Asset-based community development: the carrier-bag map versus the needs map. §6’s institutional half; the canonical demonstration that deficit-mapping produces dependency on the mappers.
Shelf VII: Proposed accessions occasioned by this paper
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). The disarmament voice this ethos most needs: from inside Jim Crow, with zero illusion about oppression’s reality, the demonstration that fear, deception, and hatred complete the oppressor’s work within the oppressed. Lets §3 and §7 be said in the register of the Black church rather than of any present polemic. Recommended for the Room itself.
Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). The institutional proof of §2: maximal truth about atrocity as the foundation, not the enemy, of a shared future. Truth-conditioned amnesty as the sincere past made procedure.
George Bonanno, The End of Trauma (2021), and Ann Masten, Ordinary Magic (2014). The resilience science: recovery and resilience as the modal human trajectory, expectancy as an active ingredient, presumptive brokenness as quietly iatrogenic. The empirical floor under §5’s refusal to narrate people as their damage.
Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep” (Psychological Inquiry, 2016). The peer-reviewed name for the semantic drift §4 describes: harm-concepts expanding to ever milder referents. Lets the paper cite a literature rather than throw an elbow.
Amanda Ripley, High Conflict (2021). Conflict entrepreneurs and the us/them trap; the journalism of how communities get stuck in the grievance loop and the documented exits from it. Practical companion to Follett.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). The last freedom, the chosen stance toward what cannot be changed, from the century’s least impeachable witness. The oldest modern proof that acknowledging the full weight of the past and refusing to be finished by it are one act, not two.
Cross-references within the ecology
“Knowing When Not to Measure” (2026): the measurement half of the one discipline · foundations.md: the five governing principles · Rosa translation and rubric methodology paper (in progress, Evaluation) · “Reading the Grain of a Funder” (2026, in-house): the Ear discipline in practice · The Steward space build brief: where the razor, the stations, and the ledgers become furniture.