A Provisional Ethos for Interpersonal Interaction

Over the course of my life I've tried to reconcile the various conflicting aspects of my personality. I've always been an introvert and something of an intellectual, but in my many years of almost complete antisociality, I've become intensely focused on my own feelings, unable to comprehend the emotions of others and powerfully frustrated by those who demand that I should. I want to react to others as a Spock-like figure of logic, yet I would despise anyone who tried to deal with me on that basis, or worse yet tried to demand that I behave that way when I was not in a mood to do so. I've grown up to be a very moody and unstable person, and it infuriates me to deal with people who can't comprehend how I feel, yet I also get sick of them expecting me to know how they feel when they refuse to just tell me in plain English.

It might seem as though these desires simply contradict each other, and are typical of my manic-depressive nature, but I've always believed otherswise, and I think I've finally hit on how to express the underlying truth which connects these seemingly irreconcileable opposites. Basically, if I were to boil my ethos in this matter down to a single concrete statement, it would look something like this:

"Your feelings are the real you; they are everything that makes you yourself, and are more important than anything else in your life. But they are also uniquely your own, and no-one can or should ever fully comprehend them."

On this basis, I would speculate that it would be best if all people could deal with each other on a basis of respectful distance, not expecting to know them completely or be known by them completely. Imagine that they are in fact emissaries of a foreign nation, with whom you must be cautiously respectful of their culture while recognizing that they are just never going to be speaking quite the same language as you, that the experiences which make them who they are have simply made them too different, and that there will always be a certain level of misunderstanding. Patience and detachment are key to success in such relationships; you should not assume that someone who says something that sounds insulting actually intended to insult you, nor should you assume that a compliment is sincere and untinged with sarcasm - you should avoid all such assumptions altogether, and always work patiently to attain greater clarity in all such communications.

Yes this will waste a lot of time and be unpleasantly formal, but I think it'd be worth it to put a stop to all the bullshit interpersonal drama that makes life such a soap-opera at times, and impedes the process of actually living it.

EDIT (about 3 hours after the initial post):
To expand on this a little more, what I'm talking about isn't necessarily "feelings" or "emotions" - it might be more accurate to say "perspectives", which can include ideologies as well as sensitivities. This also ties into my pseudo-religion, in that I believe the only reason why the difficult business of living should have to be done at all, is that somehow, our individual and flawed perspectives on the world are in some fashion cosmically necessary, and so we must treasure these feelings, beliefs and ideas as being the purpose underlying our lives. This therefore suggests that it is crucially important that we respect one another's right to feel differently, for it is the whole reason why the other person needs to exist - if you had all the answers, other human beings would not be necessary, you could just piss off into your own solipsistic paradise forever. But somehow, here we are, so I choose to believe it is because we're somehow meant to be what we are, and that includes our capacity to disagree.

The Day of Reason

I've had an eventful 24 hours; I met the president of the company I work for, who was previously just an ominious name on paperwork suggesting our nauseatingly corporate management was getting even more so, but he turned out to be a decent-seeming enough guy (however much difference an individual's superficial personality makes, when he still has to be perfectly willing to fire 100 employees if that's the only way to balance a budget; little wonder that duplicity ranks highly among the most necessary skills of such persons, as they need to be able to smile to your face while debating whether or not to ruin your life for the sake of their own pension). I then read an alarming article on a piece of legislation that has deeply disturbing implications, and became physically sick with worry as a result, but in the grip of this stress-induced fever, I experienced a moment of clarity, like the eye of a hurricane, and now I look back and feel a renewed sense of faith that things will manage to sort themselves out. I despise obliviousness and have deeply criticized whether this choice was incorrect, but ultimately I feel comfortable that I'm not simply fiddling while Rome burns, that in fact this particular Rome has numerous robust fire-suppression systems and that the disabling of one of the most central ones is not going to singlehandedly doom the entire empire.

In other news, I find it surprising to note that I've never yet mentioned on this blog the way my life changed in September of 2010, when I took my only vacation to date and set foot in a city outside Minnesota for the first time (or more precisely the second time, along with the first and third, if you count just stopping over in airports for a couple hours). I've mentioned Roleplaying Games on the blog before, specifically "Mage: the Awakening", whose publisher White Wolf has been a tremendous influence on my life; they have over a dozen of these gamelines of which I vastly enjoy at least ten. But it wasn't until they sponsored a "once in a lifetime" event (annoyingly that turned out not to be true, so the rather desperate scramble to take a vacation on very short notice turned out not to have been necessary, though it certainly bore fruit), a convention known as the Grand Masquerade and taking place in New Orleans, that I discovered what would come to be my far-and-away favorite of all the games they are still publishing - Changeling: the Lost. I'll come back to what this game is like and why it's pertinent to this post shortly.

So I had this very upsetting and exhilirating day, during which I was pushed to an edge by worry for the future, and suddenly the clouds parted for a moment and I had what felt like an epiphany*. That revelation was an insight in the vein of my usual desire for utopian solutions, one so elegant in its simplicity that it felt like the best such creation I'd ever produced (though of course I've had that feeling before and the thoughts which provoked it then do not impress me today). I immediately began to refer to December 15, 2011 as "The Day of Reason" in all of my journals in honor of this insight, as it seemed to deserve special mention as a watershed event in my life, whose effect on everything I would do thereafter would be measurable enough to qualify as a new epoch in my personal history.

The precept I concocted was this: "An ideal society acknowledges only one crime, 'Being Unreasonable', and prescribes only one punishment for that crime, 'Being Prevented from Action Until One Can Act Reasonably'."

Now I know that already some literal-minded nebbish is whining, "But we can't implement a policy like that without having a precise definition of exactly what constitutes 'reason' in any given scenario." Bullshit. Reason is functionally the same as common sense, and we call it "common sense" because nearly everyone possesses it, or at least that used to be true when the concept was formulated. If you don't know what the reasonable course of action is for a given scenario, then think about it some more, talk it over with as many people as possible, and figure it out. This is the only plan we need - take all factors into account, get the facts straight, and work out the correct approach. The main reason this doesn't already happen is that we don't enforce the second clause - we allow people who are in power to do whatever they see fit to do, and problems inevitably result because they are capable of acting unreasonably. We human beings are twitchy folks, we all get up on the wrong side of the bed some day, and a lot of us are completely full of ourselves. It is not reasonable for us to operate on the basis of these flawed perspectives; that is where my theory completes itself. By backing off from an issue and giving it more thought, we better minimize the effects of our emotional turmoil and arrogant preconceptions; we refrain from lashing out stupidly in panic or wrath, prohibited from acting on the basis of self-righteous arrogance. And yes, sometimes swift and decisive action is needed in a situation, but that too is a parameter which must be evaluated reasonably, deciding on a sensible basis rather than a prideful one whether you should continue arguing about an issue as the clock ticks. The reasonable thing to do in such cases is to act, but be fully aware of the possibility you're miscalculating, and use hindsight to evaluate the decision after the fact and be better prepared for next time.

Ultimately this approach is really impossible to substitute for; there aren't really any easy answers, just good decision-making ability being applied individually to every situation, with a minimum of damaging personal hangups. Of course, we've tried it before and it hasn't tended to work, but there's a reason for that, and it ties into the other subject of this post, the Changeling game. A very brief sketch for those who don't know the game: you play a person who was abducted and transformed by the Fair Folk, who are alien beings somehow born from the stories and dreams of humanity, who are magical and often beautiful, but tremendously arrogant and petty, with cruel and deranged natures. The game bills itself as having a theme of "beautiful madness", which is rather akin to this very blog's title (as the link between beauty and divinity is the very meaning of the word "sublime", and the reason why churches have stained-glass windows and paintings on the walls). The game is vague on exactly what the True Fae are and why they act as they do; mostly it seems to come down to them simply being batshit insane, but there are also implications that they don't just crave novelty and controversy, but are actually physically dependent on those things for their very survival. And that is why CtL pertains to the "Day of Reason".

In CtL, characters affiliate themselves with a bunch of emotions and concepts which are conceived of as being in opposition to one another - Fear and Desire, Shame and Disgust, Suffering and Ecstacy, Hope and Despair, etc. With the way I was totemizing Reason in this latest theory, my brain went to a Changeling place and I asked myself whether Reason had an opposite, and almost immediately I realized the answer - Drama. Being Reasonable all the time is boring, and a severe aversion to boredom is exactly the kind of moody, selfish motivation that gets in the way of Reason. Not that I don't understand the impulse - having to wait a whole two seconds to get onto the Internet frustrates me too, but if I make an effort to think about it, I can quickly recognize that this isn't precisely a display of logic worthy of the Greek philsophers (except maybe for Aristotle, given what a loon he could be about certain issues). Craving excitement, novelty, and tempestuous displays, akin to what we derive from our various entertainments, is a very understandable thing to do, but not a Reasonable one. When we watch a soap opera, we don't want to see wise and sensible people exercising self-control and making prudent decisions. We want to see them show passion, act out in over-the-top ways, and engage in conflict where we become emotionally invested in the outcome. We want drama, and that's a pretty sensible thing to ask for in fiction, but it causes a lot of problems when it goes too far in Real Life.

So that is the theme of the day. Drama is interesting, vital, and necessary to our mental health - but it would be nice if we could confine it mostly to soap operas, instead of the evening news or the workplace or the halls of governance. Let Real Life be a little boring, and don't take things up a notch just because it'll be more exciting. Of course, this is not a Commandment or a Prohibition; such absolutes are not Reasonable. Drama excites us because we recognize it in ourselves; we can't be 100% Reasonable at all times, and it wouldn't be Reasonable to expect us to. But we could stand to be a lot more self-aware than we are about how often we allow our love of fictional Drama to make a very factual and Unreasonable mess of our lives. If we could practice being a little less "Fae" in our daily lives, life would get easier across the board, and we'd still have Fiction to amuse ourselves.

And the very existence of people who do otherwise, who behave Unreasonably, consistently tempts us to be Unreasonable ourselves; we may even hate those who seem to be more Reasonable than we think they should in the face of such provocation. We become desperate to lash out at the cause of our miseries, and don't think it's a bad thing if we're being Unreasonable, since our perceived opponents are obviously even more so. Thus is Drama created, and the Fae laugh at us from the shadows of our imagination, knowing they don't even have to exist in order to make us suffer for their amusement. As I say this now, I am being a little Unreasonable, creating an emotionally impactful and Dramatic argument which attempts to rouse the audience's interest and passion. If I went too far in such an argument, I would be behaving Unreasonably and creating Drama. You can't force someone to do the right thing, though, and therefore I will stop trying (for the moment at least; the temptation will doubtlessly return and I likely will not retain my current degree of Reason forever). The only wise and decent thing to do is to dial back on the intensity, even if the very thing you're arguing against IS the principle of dialing back intensity. The system can balance itself, but only if you accept that the middle is a good place to be.

For now that's as far as I've gotten on this line of thought.

*Many philosophies have emphasized how enlightenment often seems to stem from personal distress. That sort of harsh truism turns up a lot in philosophies which attempt to explain why the world is as screwy as it clearly is, hoping to attach a palatable explanation to the way things are constantly going awry. I find these kinds of "grim satori" to be quite depressing, and often wonder (perhaps because I'm a bit messed-up in the head) whether life is even worth living if it must answer to such seemingly cruel and intolerant principles. Meanwhile there's the other downside of this analysis - many of the teachers who've imparted this "take the bad with the good" lesson were trying to bring a sense of serenity and comfort to their students for their own benefit, but many others were just trying to protect the status quo and prevent fairly justifiable insurrections against their educational authority, or simply stroke their own egos with self-congratulatory nonsense about how enlightened they were. It's often frustratingly difficult to figure out where to draw the line.

The Imprudence of Faith

There's a certain class of people - often female, usually older, and nearly always Christian - whose worldview relies entirely on optomism and Faith. They believe Jesus loves them and that God has a plan; they think life is inherently good even if all you ever do is sit around knitting and gossipping about your grandchildren, and they have a strong sense that everything will work out okay. They are kind, sweet, polite, well-meaning, and incredibly dangerous.

They don't mean to be dangerous, of course, but neither do people who go out driving on icy roads and crash their cars and kill themselves or others. Life is dangerous; life is harsh and unforgiving, and Faith that everything's going to be okay tends to lead to not taking precautions which could save your skin when the worst actually does happen. People who have this endless greed for positivity are essentially addicts; the euphoric high they get from having their beliefs vindicated by every piece of good news they see is equivalent to a mild buzz, like popping pills. They don't want to hear bad news; they often call the newspaper and ask to see more good news, apparently ignorant of the idea that reporters are supposed (in theory, when money doesn't dictate otherwise) to tell the plain and unvarnished truth. They want to pretend that if they only ever think good thoughts, they'll only ever have good experiences.

And by being kind and sweet and personable, they encourage others to like them, and to mimic the mindset that seems to be bringing them such contentment - and therefore, they cause others to behave irresponsibly, as though blissed-out on Faith, with or without actually being blissed-out on Faith. Either way, they've taught other people not to watch their backs, and produced a world of frail, desperate belief in the essential goodness of life, which shatters into sharp blades of anguish the moment reality comes crashing down around their ears. If they had been content to have a balanced outlook on life, accepting the bad with the good and taking reasonable precautions, they wouldn't face this disastrous risk.

Prudence is the art of sound decision-making, and it is antithetical to Faith. Which doesn't mean Faith is inherently bad, only that it's a specific kind of tool, like a backscratcher, weak and impractical, useful for making yourself feel good but not for doing actual work. People do not realize this; they treat Faith as if it was a swiss-army knife to solve all their problems, and then they find themselves helpless when it snaps under a mild degree of pressure.

Have I Found Myself Lost?

Damn, it's been a long time since I updated here. My blogger instincts, nascent as they were in the first place, have still managed to atrophy. There has been a lot of not-very-significant change in my life recently, and it's hard to sort out what is worth talking about. Still, I feel a need to try, so instead of completing one of the several drafts that I have laying around which I've never actually published, I'll write a whole new entry developed from a single paragraph I wrote in frustration at work.

The drum I've been marching to lately has been a sense of profound disgust and dissatisfaction with the nature of our very reality. Everywhere around me I see evidence of how fundamentally flawed human psychology is, and how many wrong decisions people have made in the dim past and then continued to uphold as valuable cultural traditions. These frustrations have come out in my work life and have pushed me to the edge of losing my job - that I dislike my job intensely on a number of levels means that in a way I almost want to lose it, yet in a much more immediate and practical way, doing so would be suicidal, as the economy's ruined state means that a person of my sort cannot count on ever being able to sell his rather inspecific skills when he can't be humble enough to beg the approval of an employer. And so my frustration festers, having no healthy outlet and a disastrous surfeit of unhealthy ones, of which this blog is one of the least unhealthy and thus one of the easiest ones to forget. Such is the Ouroborean nature of our world's torment of us.

Still, I refuse to give up hope. Though the Earth may seem ruled by a tyrant God who cares only that he is obeyed, though the Adversary seems to have warped the very processes of life in order to make the most horrifying parasites and predators also the greatest evolutionary successes, though we seem guranteed to be devalued as human beings, considered entitled to neither the basics of life nor the mercy of death but prisoned forever in a parody of discomfort and slow decrepitude, thus that actual agony and horror is actually preferable just for its novelty...still I have the gall to believe that our world can be saved, that we do not need to accept that misery is our only lot. I read a couple Cracked.com articles on anger management and the fragility of the Internet recently, and recognized that they were like warning signs to my embattled perspective; they've diminished my sense of needing to fight back against the injustice I see all around me, but not by much. And so still I find myself writing, and wishing to publicize, sayings such as this:

"There can be no higher authority than the judgment of a wise person in matters of his own responsibility. Crime is a consequence of failure to understand the consequences of your actions; no one would ever commit a crime if we were all wise, and causing us all to be wise is much more worthwhile than forbidding us all from crimes, as such forbiddance cannot be perfectly enforced. The only way human beings can be trusted to do the right thing is if they are given the ability to determine it absolutely, and then allowed to self-motivate in its pursuit. No one can force us to do the right thing; they can only empower us to perceive it and trust that we know what's good for us."

Perhaps I'm not being very objective, but as I look upon these words I wrote three days ago, the very day that I was given a final "toe the line or else" warning at my job, I find that they still seem profound and meaningful. Why is it that, when a man like me pens a commandment like this, people do not abandon their obviously-dysfunctional way of life in order to try out the new way? Why do we continue to obey laws which we know are obsolete, work at jobs we consider pointless, vote for politicians we know are only out to line their pockets at our expense, and then obediently do whatever someone tells us when they put a gun to our head in order to force us to betray our principles? Why is it so impossible for people to behave as beings of higher reason, instead of as spastic animals who hate their lives yet would do anything to avoid dying?

I can see so many clearly-correct solutions to the world's problems, and all they would require is one tiny miracle to make them work. Could we not conjure that miracle if we directed our will in sufficient numbers? How many people must refuse to fear the gun before they actually become bulletproof? Why is it that everyone sells out, when no-one selling out would render money powerless to enslave us? Why do people cling foolishly to the words of long-dead prophets, willing to kill their neighbor over a differing interpretation of just one word in their holy book? It is easy to look at these tragic paradoxes and believe that we are doomed, that this world's nature is atrocity and that all hope is false. Yet I cannot make myself believe this. I still nurture the flame of Hope within me...and I still believe that if enough other people would feed me the fuel for that spark, or at least stop standing between me and a forest I can set alight, that I could still be our Lightbringer, and free us from the chains of our intolerable universe.

The Impossible Dream

The inestimable Douglas Adams included an interesting idea in his most famous novel, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"; he said that human beings are capable of flying, but that it almost never happens because in order to fly, you have to "throw yourself at the ground but accidentally miss". He emphasizes that you can't miss on purpose; you have to be trying your best to splatter yourself against the earth and coincidentally fail. Which creates an interesting implication - in deliberately trying to get yourself killed, but failing through no fault of your own, you can do the impossible.

The idea is rather similar to something you see happen a lot in a more widely popular medium: Hanna-Barbera cartoons, most commonly those featuring Wile E. Coyote. In these cartoons, it is quite common for a character who is intent on some mission to walk off the edge of a cliff and travel effortlessly along a path through the air, only abruptly falling when he suddenly realizes he's left the comfort of solid ground. Like the Douglas Adams version, this theory of subjective gravity emphasizes that you can't deliberately remain in midair, but rather can fail to notice that you're doing so, and thus not have to answer to the gravity you're not currently aware of. These two fictions can teach us an important fact.

It may not be possible to defy gravity through absent-mindedness, but it is possible to go to sleep (despite all the evidence to the contrary which I am currently presenting, as I write this three hours after the latest I should normally have turned in for the day so as to maintain my nocturnal schedule). And going to sleep means withdrawing your consciousness from the external reality, entering the realm of dreams, a plane of the miraculous where you can do anything you can imagine and nothing can permanently harm you (there are a few downsides, involving lack of conscious volition and possible a certain blunting of sensory input, but overall the majority of people seem to find their dreams more or less pleasant most of the time, and those who take the time to cultivate lucid dreaming skills can find the experience even more rewarding). Much as with freedom from gravity, freedom from consciousness of the external universe is a liberating and immensely rewarding experience - and impossible to do on command.

As pointed out in the movie "Inception", no one ever notices the beginning of a dream. In order to dream, you must first let your mind go blank; only after that does your brain begin rebuilding your consciousness for the day, starting with the aimless experiences of dreams which keep you occupied until your thought processes fully reactivate, and can be used to propel your waking body again. You can't just suddenly decide to dream; all you can decide to do is try to turn off your mind and wait for the dream to form around you before pulling you into it mid-scene. And turning your brain off and sleeping, like missing the ground and flying, is something you cannot do on purpose. You have to wait until your attention wanders of its own accord, and not notice that you're busy being awake, just like Wile E. Coyote needs to not notice he's left the ground. As you attempt to drift off, every flicker of sensory input other than darkness, white noise, and minor body awareness threatens to slam you back into your body, just like gravity slamming Coyote into the ground; there is, therefore, a certain element of Luck involved in the fact that we ever get to sleep at all.

I've not yet mentioned my personal religion on this blog, I don't think; time to fix that. I don't try too hard to convince others to believe as I do, and I certainly don't want to make other people worship my particular gods; they are totems I picked out from various world religions because I had a personal appreciation for what they represent. But I think most people could do worse than to consider the central tenet of my spirituality: the gods exist only in your mind, and that is where all their power must operate. Regardless of what you call God, he almost certainly can't lift a rock for you, and He very probably can't change an enemy into a friend, but one thing He might be able to do is change your mind, since that's where He lives. Since you are His host, he won't start moving your mental funiture around without your permission, but if you ask Him (or Her; I find that my desire to worship anything without breasts is never terribly strong) to help you out with some task that involves only your own mind, He might be able to do something. Technically, it's you that's doing it - even the atheists can get in on this form of prayer, because it doesn't require any belief, although the non-volitional mind of the faithful may be helpful for the same reason that a short attention span helps Wile E. Coyote to delay his pratfalls. But whether it involves faith or not, the action of focusing on a living symbol such as a deity may be helpful in achieving some of these frustratingly impossible-to-guarantee tasks that Life throws our way.

So if we need Luck to find our way to Dreamland, and God exists only in our mind, then guess what? Lady Luck is a Goddess, She can live in you if you want Her to, and maybe, just maybe, she can help you get the Luck you need.

Sweet dreams.

Building the Monkeysphere Nation

Think about the number of people you know. Now ask yourself how many of them you really know.

Sociologists and neurologists and similar scholars have proposed a concept which is formally known as Dunbar's Number, but it is more likely to be known to the non-scientists of the Internet as "the Monkeysphere", a name bestowed upon it by Cracked.com which has the advantage of being catchy and easy to comprehend. The Monkeysphere is the collection of your fellow monkeys, that is to say human beings, which you can fully conceptualize as people. Your immediate family, your close friends, your coworkers, service providers with which you interact on a very regular basis (such as the barber who cuts your hair every week, or the barista at a coffee shop you visit roughly every other day), and service providers you see more rarely but have a greater sense of trust and respect toward (such as a doctor or a career counselor). It is your own little social network, and everyone within it is a real person to you; you can reasonably well understand their personality, you feel empathy toward their concerns, and you can remember how they relate to one another.

Outside of this group, you simply don't have the mental processing power required to remember any more people in such detail, and so you begin to generalize. People are reduced in your mind to faceless functionaries; you can't bring yourself to care about them, though you can easily resent them - they in essence become objects or animals to you, something to "deal with" rather than "feel for". You tend to make assumptions about them rather than try to understand the truth, because they aren't weighted in your mind as being important enough to bother genuinely learning about. It's like the difference between something you think is true because you saw an unsourced claim, and something that you've extensively researched; you know your friends because you cared enough to invest time learning how they really feel, while someone you're not attached to as a person, you can simply assume they probably fit whatever stereotype is closest to how they appear to be, and not bother to try any harder than that.

Various numbers have been proposed for Dunbar's Number; the most often quoted figure is 150. It may vary from person to person, but it may also be determined absolutely by human brain size; this isn't yet well-understood. Regardless of how big the number is, however, it almost certainly is far less than the number of people modern society forces us to deal with. And when your "monkeysphere" excludes people that society expects you to deal with, bad things happen. You assume the police are government-sanctioned thugs and react with discourtesy to them, increasing their burnout toward their job and making it more likely that they'll turn out to be exactly what you think they are. This happens on every stratum of society, and is quite inevitable, because we're simply being asked to keep track of more people than we possibly can.

A more sensible system would be for all government to be localized, consisting of interlocking "monkeyspheres" where every person has a network of friends who each have their own network of friends, and nobody ever tries to govern outside their own little zone. If we go with the number 150, then maybe a doctor can have about 50 patients, and he knows all of them as well as he knows his own family, cares just as much about their health and would never cut corners at their expense just to turn a profit. His monkeysphere would include the owner of his building, and the landlord's monkeysphere would include the city planner who makes sure the building isn't a fire hazard, but there wouldn't be any governmental links that aren't based on this very tight association. This closely personal touch would prevent people from making decisions about a situation they didn't understand, and would forbid them from dehumanizing people that they have to interact with.

Now the question becomes, how do you create and enforce a system like that?

God's Impossible Choice - In Memory of Bill Hicks

Let's assume* for a moment that the Christian God exists and is more or less as he is generally believed to be - all-knowing, all-seeing, all-wise, all-powerful, and all-benevolent. In fact, let's pretend you are those things. Let's say you're God, and you can do anything you want, but you don't want to do anything that harms your human children, because you love them with all your infinite compassion and it would totally undo your very reason for existing if you ever did them harm.

Consider, for a moment, that two of your children include Sammy the Spy and Harry the Hacker. Sammy is a corporate espionage agent who has spent his whole life learning how to gather information; this is his only saleable skill set. He makes his living by finding out what corporations are doing and then selling that information to other companies. Harry, meanwhile, is an anarchist who steals cable and takes out fake credit cards in the names of politicians whose platform he disagrees with; he's facing both financial ruin and jail time if he's ever caught, while Sammy will be lucky if he gets off with only a lawsuit when and if the corporations learn what information he's stolen from them.

Leaving aside all issues of ethics, morals or laws for the moment (because God loves all his children, even when they misbehave), God still faces a dilemma with these two. Because Harry believes in the "hacker ethic", which states "Information deserves to be free" (naturally the hacker's current location and real name is exempted from this policy, as the hackers couldn't survive very long if they applied their policy to themselves and thereby allowed their enemies to find them, but we'll regard this as being common sense rather than hypocrisy, as the line is often fine between those things). Whereas Sammy's entire career revolves around the idea that knowledge is a tradeable commodity.

So, you're God, and you know everything - but while Harry wants you to tell everything you know to everyone who could possibly want to know it, Sammy doesn't. And Sammy wants you to restrict the flow of information even more, so that there are more secrets for him to spy out and sell; that would go against Harry's interests. So no matter what you do, you're doomed to reduce the livelihood of one of these two individuals.

If God is real, then he faces thousands of choices like this a day. He can't possibly give everyone what they want, and there are no easy answers about what's best. Granted, it's hard to believe that there's nothing he could do which would be a net improvement to the world and humanity as a whole - certainly dialing back on the earthquakes and storms would be all-upside as far as everything that we currently consider "alive" is concerned. So we can hardly say that "God doesn't answer prayers because it's impossible to please everyone", but that certainly does seem as though it might be part of the reason. We don't know whether God does or does not exist, but we certainly know he'd have difficulty making decisions like this if he did - and as we gain more and more power over our world, we must begin to think like God and figure out how to make such decisions ourselves, absent our short-sighted, selfish, and emotionally unstable biases.

This post is dedicated to Bill Hicks, and in his honor I include a phrase not included in the thought I'm discussing above, but is similarly a reflection on his mostly-enlightened-except-when-he-was-really-pissed-off-usually-for-a-damn-good-reason philosophy on life, which I have found is in the process of becoming an Internet meme and richly deserves to be one:

FUCK YOUR NATIONALISM, WE ARE ALL EARTHLINGS.

(This post was never completed.)

http://health.newsvine.com/_news/2011/05/26/6725724-brace-yourself-for-the-summer-of-sluts

The nerfing of perjoratives is a good project; every word should have its genuine meaning and be freed of inappropriate emotional context, particularly if it's negative and hurtful. There's no such thing as a bad word; words are descriptors for the world, and the world is neither good nor evil, it simply is.

Therefore, much as these women are out to reclaim the word "Slut", I say it is time for us to reclaim the word "laziness", free it of its punitive context and accept that it describes a condition as honorable as any other lifestyle. The opposite of laziness is not merely productivity; it is also restlessness, discontent, and an inability to belong. The slobbish couch potato may be disgusting, but he is also perfectly acclimated to his environment, having achieved the goal of his evolution.

(I never finished this post at the time, and am editing it now only for readability. If and when I'm up to the effort of completing it anew, I will link back to it; for now it is only an artifact of the archive.)

Money Is the Root?

I have a lot of opinions about the role that money should play in our society, and have found that they can be classed under three basic headings. Here are my three perspectives on the topic: they are listed as "good", "neutral", and "evil", in each case with this word roughly corresponding to a measure of money's purpose and value in the world. The truth lies somewhere amid these three assessments, I suspect.

The Good Perspective
"Money is the medium of the Sacred Exchange: a web of interactions which binds all of humanity together through mutually beneficial trade. It does not belong to one person, any more than the blood in your body belongs to one finger; it is meant to flow freely throughout society, going wherever it is needed and never tarrying long enough to grow stagnant and become a force of obstruction. When you need money, you should gain it; when you have more than you need, pass the surplus along. Pointless greed is a disease of the mind; learn to evaluate the difference between 'want' and 'have use for', so that you are not tempted to acquire things you won't appreciate simply for the sake of acquisition. Become a valued customer of many businesses, and possibly the good proprietor of one or two of your own; the social networking, not the money, is the objective in either case."

The Neutral Perspective
"Money is an abstraction, a temporary substitute forced on us by reality which we need to make use of, but we should never mistake it for being desireable, any more than a bandage substitutes for unbroken skin. The energy that we spend on trying to get money would be better set on trying to become immune to the need for it; permanent solutions to problems are worth investing a little effort, time, and even money in, but stopgaps are much less so. Never mistake the presence of a full bank account for true stability; the only way you've actually won the game of life is if you can give all your cash away to charity and still be okay for the rest of your life without a dollar to your name."

The Evil Perspective
"Money is totally a drug - you can't get enough of it, it artificially makes you feel good even when your life is otherwise going straight to shit, and you start suffering the moment you run out. The only difference is that heroin and the like have the decency to kill you when you overdose - those who gain an unreasonable amount of money and spend it way too fast remain trapped in their mockery of happiness and keep plunging down the moral slip-slide in search of still more."

Don't Be a Fair-Weather Friend

Many times have I been informed that some procedure at my workplace would not be changed in my favor because it "wouldn't be fair". Of course I was opposed to this at first just out of sheer self-centeredness, but as is my fashion I also thought deeply through the reasons behind my reaction, attempting to discover a motivation beyond mere selfishness, since I have good reason to suspect I'm usually not that shallow. And sure enough, what began as my sour grapes at being so denied has grown into a revelation about what I believe is necessary to create a better world.

According to Wikipedia, "The just-world fallacy refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault."

Anyone who has not long since learned that life isn't fair quite simply isn't paying attention. We live in a world where bad things happen to good people and vice versa at least as often as anything seemingly deserved happens, and yet we continue to cling to this screamingly nonsensical notion that life is just and fair. (Wishing it WAS just or fair is perfectly fine; it is only refusing to accept the obvious fact that it ISN'T that I have a problem with, and more especially insisting on setting policy on the basis of this delusion.)

Not only do I personally oppose the doctrine of fairness, but I outright declaim it as being responsible for a good fifth of all human misery. Since it takes resources we don't have to elevate all people to the utmost of happiness, any attempt to be fair can functionally consist only of spitefully dragging everyone down to the same level of misery. It is the absolute antithesis of what the world needs in order to grow beyond its failings. Any attempt to enforce fairness on the world can only consist of spreading the contagion of unhappiness like a man with ebola flinging gouts of his own infectious blood at everyone he can reach to make sure he doesn't die alone.

Stop accepting the inevitability of evil. Stop blaming the victims of life's fundamentally mean-spirited nature, no matter how much you may think they had it coming. Stop accepting that anyone who is in power deserves to be, that authority figures deserve your trust just because you've always trusted them before. We can solve these problems, but not until we stop pretending they'll solve themselves because everything works out in the end. It doesn't, it never has, and it never will. Luck is arbitrary, justice is imaginary, and things aren't going to take care of themselves. If we want the world to work in a fashion that we consider right, we have to make that happen, not claim it's already happening. And until that transformation is completed, cosmos-wide and right down to the most fundamental law of physics, so that all problems generate their own solutions and everything balances out in a fashion that pleases us, until then we will continue to be trapped in a galaxy-wide quagmire of injustice that only gets more dangerous when we fail to acknowledge its presence. (You'll find that very few things do otherwise, come to think of it.)

LIFE ISN'T FAIR. Accept it, and start thinking about better ways of dealing with that fact. Otherwise, you're part of the problem. Nothing could be more unfair than imposing your personal, biased definition of fairness on someone else. Ditch the entire concept from your vocabulary and start trying to do what's RIGHT, not simply what's equitable. That is the only way life will ever improve.

Those Wonderful Parasites?

My mind went recently to a number of retro video games that I was once highly addicted to; it's been a long time since I felt like playing much of many computer games, but I still miss those days, they seem to have involved a more continuous, though less deeply satisfying, degree of happiness in my life, whereas working for a living and being indolent during my free time has lead to both more personal productivity and spiritual satisfaction, as well as more boredom and bleak despair. The games I was flashing back to included the fighting game "Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport" (a Mortal Kombat-type game with alien characters), the combat strategy game "Dark Legions" (a more sophisticated relative of the NES classic Archon as well as a direct competitor that lost out to the original Warcraft), and the more strategic (though it still has a combat element, it's mostly about resource management) game "Deadlock: Planetary Conquest".

The reason I bring this up is that I had an interesting thought about one of the seven alien races (well, six plus humans, but one of the reasons I like Deadlock is that it actually treats humans as being just as weird as the aliens, rather than being the default from which they all diverge) is a species evolved from tree-worms known as the Uva Mosk. They're one of my two favorites in the game*, a little of which has to do with the fact that they generate tons of natural resources and thus are fairly easy to play (but not too easy, a descriptor fitting my least favorite races), but mostly it's because of why they get more resources than anyone else. The idea is that, having evolved from parasites who subsisted off immense plants which were their entire world, when they became intelligent they extended their opinion of The Tree to encompass The Planet, and then other planets when they achieved spaceflight. So they have this really interesting philosophy about how all sentient lifeforms are parasites on their planets, and have an obligation to care for their health.

All this is blog material because it points out some of the problems with the English language as it's currently understood by American culture. You see, in our common-sense definition, the word "parasite" is almost invariably taken as a negative; the idea of the Uva Mosk therefore "swims upstream" in our collective consciousness, because they aren't really parasites if they care for the planets they "infect". There is a proper term for lifeforms that subsist harmlessly off their host, commensal, and another term for those who actively help the host survive, symbiote. However, "commensal" is not a term which has ever really entered common use, and most of the social mainstream has never heard it, while "symbiote" is almost as obscure and is often misused in chatter to mean "something which takes over your body", due probably to its careless use by certain early sci-fi writers whose influential reach perhaps exceeded their talent. (I haven't researched the issue so I apologize if this is a misconstrual of what seems to be the word's current understanding and my speculation as to its origin.)

Thusly, "symbiote" may seem like a more sinister word than "parasite", and the latter may be used to describe beneficient leeches like the Uva Mosk, even though by the strictest definition something can't be rightly called a parasite unless its presence is a net negative for the host. I'm even guilty of this linguistic drift myself; wanting to reach that wider audience, I've written my philosophies to use "parasite" imprecisely in a fashion that people might be able to "grok" even if it's technically wrong, rather than disorient them with a less familiar word like "symbiote" or a completely obscure one like "commensal".

There's a lesson in all this, part of which is just that Americans in general and myself in particular are lazy bastards, but also hopefully some of it pertains to the ease with which linguistic drift occurs, and that we should beware of its effects.

* For any fellow goobers who wondered, the Cyth are my other favorite, with the Re'Lu a distant third and humans fourth, the Tarth being the ones that bore me the most and the Ch'Cht being marginally preferable to the Maug. My reasons for these preferences are many but both of the top slots are based primarily on what I regard as "pure cool factor", being a little more intellectual in the Uva Mosk's case while the Cyth benefit from the basic factors that almost invariably make villains cool, them being the most nearly objectively evil of the races even if they do have something resembling a reason for what they do. And even if they aren't evil, they're definitely "dark" and so tap into the same awesomeness factors as Darth Vader, Sauron, The Kurgan, Warcraft III's Undead, and so forth.

The American Fever-Dream

(I originally posted including several quotes which I later discovered I had already used in one of my earliest entries, all the way back in March 2010; I have deleted the redundancies.)

The lesson of America is not that many become one, it is that one contains many. We must not become a collectivist regime where individuals accept their status as interchangeable parts of the societal mechine. That might be part of why communism was our enemy back in the day; aside entirely from what Soviet Russia actually was, what it appeared to be was essentially the Borg. America needs to have unity, but not conformity; we must strive to stand out from the group and be different from each other, because no other nation in history has ever valued diversity as specifically as ourselves. We need to be not a melting pot, but a chunky soup in which the ingredients retain their distinct flavors while being enhanced by a broth which absorbs only the parts of them which they most easily shed.

The government of the USA is a compromise between having a single tyrant who rules by
whim, and the impossible task of involving all our millions in democracy. We select a bit over 500 career politicians to more or less enact the will of the people, and they set about making things work for the benefit of themselves and their constituents, in that order. We actually prize them for their ability to be two-faced, because it enables them to make impossible promises to both sides of a divisive issue and then hope that people will forget about those claims before they're called to account for them. I for one do not think this is an appropriate way of doing things.

In promoting equality, we must be careful that we do not grant the intentionally stupid rights equal to the brilliant, nor the corrupt equal rights to the charitable, nor the incompetent equal rights to the skilled. Equality should exist only among those who are actually equals; we must have effective, unbiased measures of each person's worth as a human being, and ensure that everyone is equal within the parameters thereof, that no one is unfairly discriminated against OR unfairly discriminated in favor of. Those who choose to live at a lower level of proficiency are entitled to a bit more than basic survival, but not to a pat on the back. Our programs should enable them to be comfortable and safe, but ensure that incentives are there to reward them if they choose to strive for more.

The excessively dull and unimaginative are asking about now, "Well fine, but who's going to pay for it?" And aside from how incredibly boring they're being, they do have something of a point. But the first step in coming up with an answer is to figure out exactly how much money we have - and those who already have more than they deserve will do everything in their power to keep us from proving that fact. For the moment I have no resolution for this impasse. The fact that a huge amount of our money is tied up in the military industry and the criminal underground, that our wealth is literally being fired out of cannons and splattered as ash across half the Middle East, clearly proves that we're doing something wrong. But how exactly do you go about forcing compliance on those able to kill you? It's a thorny question that I am for the moment choosing to gloss over in favor of less depressing aspects of the plan.

I believe in America, but not simply because it's where I live. Mindless patriotism is the greatest ally of tyranny. If you truly love your country, you won't stand idly by while your duly-elected representatives appoint themselves dictators. Remember, the nation's leaders are not the nation; they are human beings, just as flawed and corruptible as anyone else, and they are not as trustworthy as the ideals to which they pay lip service.

I am a proud believer in the underlying ideals of the American Way; free speech is an absolute right which must be preserved against any and all attempts to constrain it. Every other nation is ruled by a government which seeks to preserve order; why can't we be the one nation whose leaders openly endorse chaos? Free expression is what is healthy; everyone speaks their mind, and if you get your feelings hurt, you withdraw for a time and process the effect, leading to greater psychological health in the long run. If you are never exposed to verbal assault, you never learn to defend yourself against it, leaving you with a frail neurotic psyche which cannot handle the contentious nature of real life.

In short: I'm proud of what America stands for, even if America itself no longer stands for it.

Free Speech From the Dumb

I am proud to be an American, but not like most people who would say that. In most cases, people who identify with their country, or their state or their football team or their religion or any other group affiliation, are just tribalizing and being clannish, promoting their sheeplike love of groupthink as a way to avoid having to address their own problems in life. Not me, though. I don't love this country just because I happened to be born here. I love it for what it stands for: freedom. It is the first country in the 7000-year history of civilization to boldly proclaim that individual freedom is its highest value, and I hold it to that standard.

As far as I'm concerned, freedom is more important than safety, peace, security, stability, or any of the other things people try to trade it away for. Granted, those things are sorts of freedom in themselves - "freedom from", rather than "freedom to", as Roosevelt put it. But when in doubt, I firmly believe we should always favor freedom to act over preventing action to protect other freedoms, unless the difference is vast. Freedom to express one's selfish anger or malice or psychosis by killing someone obviously does not have the right to eclipse their freedom to not be killed. But logically, this suggests that they have a right not to be punched in the face, or poked in the arm, or shown a gut-churning image, or be called a dirty name - these are all decreasingly reasonable, though probably still within an acceptible range of freedom-from rights. I, for one, draw the line however at complaining you were offended just by hearing someone speak a dirty word, when they weren't talking to you, or seeing it displayed when it's not being directed at anyone - and the infuriation of prohibiting such free speech is all the worse when it's not even actual profanity, but something that might be construed as offensive by an exceptionally ignorant or lily-livered person. I believe that such a case has far exceeded any reasonable claim of supporting overall freedom - this is one person's preferences being arbitrarily considered superior to another with no justification for why one wins over the other. And in such cases, I say let every other country go with traditional pretentions, but this is Fucking America and freedom-to should win here.

The incident that has set me off, though only by being the last straw: someone at my work, I don't know who and this is just as well for both our sakes, decided that my Minnesota Renaissance Festival "Wenches Want Me" shirt is offensive. This person clearly doesn't know what a wench is; they probably just assumed it meant "witch" or "bitch" because it looks sort of similar. So that ignoramus gets to tell me what I can and cannot wear, and they whined to the company and rank was pulled on me. Intolerable! This is oppression, it's rule by stupidity, and it's anti-American. I'm sick and tired of conservatives and other weak-willed sorts trying to turn this nation into a carbon copy of every other society on Earth. We radicals, we believers in true freedom of expression, we need one place on this planet where we can say whatever the fuck we want. And this country promises to be that place, so I am vehemently opposed to anyone who tries to make that promise a lie. Let those people move to some sleepy backwater nation on the other side of the world, or even to goddamn Canada; none of those other nations claim to stand for freedom, if their citizens want to be oppressed in the name of social order so be it. This should be a nation of individual expression unconstrained by the meddling of self-righteous others.

And I stand by that, even having expressed prejudices against others' free expression myself. By this very standard, I have the right to say I don't think other people should do things I don't like. But I don't have the right to enforce my prejudices on them, not even if my beliefs are the majority. That's Not What Freedom Is, Bitch.

The Sheltered Valley

I have a theory regarding the relationship between man and nature; it's meant to be allegorical more than anything, since we don't really have any way to determine whether or not it was true in the past, as it implies that the past may have been retroactively changed as a result of present observation. (The Creationists only wish they'd thought of making such a bold and unarguable claim to support their nonsensical asserions.) I first came up with it in the form of a little story-seed called The Sheltered Valley, which was actually not about exactly what I'm writing today, but shared a somewhat similar underlying theme - the idea that Mankind had pretty much screwed the pooch where Nature was concerned and was ultimately responsible for all his own miseries. So "Sheltered Valley" is now pretty much my codename for any idea with this as it's basis, and here's my first fully-developed "Sheltered Valley Hypothesis".

***********

There was a time before time, before civilization and possibly before conscious thought, when human beings lived in perfect harmony with the natural world. We got killed a lot, but we didn't care, because that was just life. There was no fear, no pride or pretention, no boredom, no ennui or existential anguish, no discontent of any kind - just animals holding a place in a harmonious natural cycle.

But we destroyed that paradigm entirely long ago; nothing lives that way anymore, hasn't for at least 200 years, probably 500, and even that is only in America, the old world has been without it for millenia. Whenever humanity sets out to tame a wilderness, he imposes his view of Nature Red in Tooth and Claw on the world he imagines grasping in his greedy hands; before he ever sets foot under the canopy, he has reshaped it to his will. Those who do not want to see the true nature of Nature never will; they see only what they expect to see.

Mind you, all of this is not me claiming that what we did was wrong, nor certainly that we should try to undo it; whether or not we should have jumped off the cliff, we did, so our only choice now is to succeed in flying. We have wounded if not killed Nature; now we must be prepared to take her place.

Ultimately, I believe that Nature has created us so that we may replace her; she has earned her Repose, and offers us a little of it as well, but also intends us to take up the burden of perpetuating existence which she has carried for billions of years. She used the only method available to her, evolution; nothing existed before her, so she used nothing to build something, and the something she built contained a lot of nothing, making it fairly fragile. That meant she could justify an extremely inefficient method of refining the almost-nothing into something which contained a lot of non-nothing - that's us. We dream new things into being with very little effort; that's our purpose and role in existing. We are standing atop a foundation of quicksand, trying to build our castle faster than it can sink - and we're doing fairly well at it, no matter how tempting it might be to believe otherwise.

In Support of Anorexia

Anorexia Nervosa in its true state is a disease, an obsession, an inability to control your behavior; that's never cool. But in our judgmental culture, doctors with a cure to push and neurotic parents fixated on saving their children from dangers real or imaginary have seized on the idea of this relatively rare mental imbalance and proceeded to diagnose it in many people who have a perfectly sane and rational desire to be thin. The distinction between the disease and the lifestyle choice is, appropriately enough, a thin one, iron-solid and razor-sharp: self-control. If you could choose to eat and gain wait but decide you'd rather not, you're healthy; if the decision is taken entirely out of your hands by a chemical imbalance in the brain or an absolutely unbreakable neurotic pattern in your mind, then you're sick and should be cured if possible. But no-one has the right to take that choice away from you. Only if *you* know you have a problem, if *you* are afraid that you're killing yourself by wasting away, but you just can't control your behavior - only then should the doctors get involved.

We exalt beauty in this culture, and we should. We create airbrushed images of impossible perfection, and we should. We look upon those illustrations of the ideal and wish it could be our reality, and we should. All of that is right and proper - we should hate the restrictions of our reality, and do everything in our power to give voice to the image of something better. (Yes, give voice to an image; they're my metaphors and I'll mix 'em if I want to.) After that, it begins to become dubious. I have nothing but admiration for the mental fortitude that it requires to defy your persistent hunger, eating just barely enough to stay alive; as long as you're doing it on an entirely conscious, intentional, non-compulsive level, I think you deserve praise for that kind of dedication. Whether being thin will actually make you beautiful varies depending on a lot of other factors - some women look gorgeous with their ribs showing and their wrists like sticks, while others appear grotesque with roughly the same proportions. But ultimately, the decision should be up to you.

When someone dies as a result, it's tragic. We should mourn for them - but we shouldn't go force-feeding other "anorexics" out of a neurotic reaction to our loss. The blame lies with reality for not being willing to make the victim look like what s/he wanted to; the universe ought to bend so that we may be content with ourselves. Our efforts should be focused on reaching out to people who are suffering with the effects of their extreme weight-loss program, offering them assistance in surviving what they do to themselves, instead of trying to convince them to stop. Telling someone that they're sick is an intolerant judgment against them, and you don't have the right. They have to decide whether they need help. If you talk to them honestly and compassionately, rather than self-righteously with a controlling "you owe me" attitude, they will accept your aid as much as they are willing to, and you can improve their odds of stabilizing at a healthy and sustainable weight. Don't let the fear that they're going to "slip away" because you "didn't do enough" get to you; if they die for their choices then they've done the right thing, and you did the right thing by letting it happen, rather than caging them in a reality that rejects them just for the sake of your own self-esteem.

All this applies only to anorexics, nervous or otherwise. Bulimics can go straight to blazes as far as I'm concerned; if you're not willing to digest your calories, don't waste perfectly good food by eating it, let alone by eating inordinate quantities of it. I respect the desire to binge, and indulge it constantly, resulting in my bloated 350-pound self (my sedentary lifestyle probably also plays a role, I'll admit); eat all you want, but have the fucking spine to accept the consequences of your eating, don't resort to emesis and squander valuable resources that the rest of society can use. Take the money you spend by not eating those binge-meals, and invest in virtual-reality research; eventually we'll figure out how to record the sense of taste on a cassette and you can get your chowdown fix through pure imagination, with no need to puke. That's the way it's done, princess; you belong in a fantasy kingdom of silicon spires and magic dream-helmets, so start building one instead of throwing a gourmet meal into the toilet.

The Ethos of Societal Solipsism

This is how you change the world. You stop hiding behind God's skirt, stop letting 'someone else' take responsibility for your life, and you recognize that it is all up to you.

You are the person who decides what the world will be. If you choose to be lazy, then the world will be lazy. If you choose to be selfish, then the world will be filled with selfish people. If you choose to be afraid, then the world will be terrifying. You don't have to become perfect, that's not realistic, nobody expects that of you. But you have to accept full responsibility for all the choices you do make. You have to stand up and admit to being everything you are, and choosing to remain so rather than choosing to change.

Turning to God and begging for help won't do you any good. I've seen God in my mind, he's real, I know he exists, and I also know that He. Is. Not. Going. To help us. This isn't his world anymore, it's ours, he gave it to us along with our free will. The moment we left the proverbial Garden, God handed over the metaphorical keys, told us this world was ours to do with what we wished, and look what a good fucking job we've done with it. He is not involved anymore. He's watching with morbid fascination while we fuck up our lives, knowing that whatever we do, it was our choice.

A good parent doesn't try to tell his kids how to live. He lets them learn their own harsh lessons, and that's what's happened here. We're like a drunk or drug addict whose determination to ruin his life forbids him from accepting any aid until he's been broken practically beyond repair; God is waiting for us to hit rock bottom, and wants to make sure that when we do, he's not there for us to depend on - because if you teach someone that you will fix their problems for them, they will never learn to do it themselves, and sooner or later you'll get sick of cleaning up their mess. We have to pull ourselves out of the hole, because that's our job, that's our responsibility, that's our choice. That's who we are. WE are the Alpha and the Omega.

There's no-one else but us, nobody will help us, nobody will hurt us, so we and we alone have to decide one thing. Do we want things to be right, or don't we? Are we willing to do whatever we're capable of doing to make things right, or are we going to choose, for whatever reasons we think are valid, to leave the world just as fucked-up as it is? You don't have to do everything, you don't have to succeed completely, you don't have to be perfect; these things take time, you won't live to see a perfect world, nor will your children or your children's children. There may not be a future at all; we may already be past the point of no return. But that doesn't change the fact that we have only two choices: do what we can, or remain as we are.

We need to acknowledge everything we are, every feeling we have and that it's just a feeling, every belief we have and that it's just a belief; we must completely admit to ourselves everything that we are, everything we wish we could be but can't, and everything we could be but don't care enough to bother. Nobody will judge us, except other people who are no better. God loves us unconditionally, but he's not going to kiss it and make it better, not anymore. He won't play favorites among his kids, he won't keep them dependent on him, he won't help them be weak and spoiled and self-indulgent, they do that well enough on their own. It's up to us now. We're all there is, and we are what we are, and we either do the best we can or we are personally responsible for everything that's wrong. Everything we are is everything we should be, exactly the way we should be, according to the only people who get to decide: us.

We're all different, and we are deeply divided about the things that make us different. We like to displace the blame for our problems onto other people, hoping that destroying the scapegoat will make us feel better - much as with getting drunk, it never actually helps, yet we never stop thinking it will. It's time for us to quit trying things that we know don't work, and accept our nature. We are flawed, we are fallible, and we need only the tiniest excuse to hate each other. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with hate. It's a natural human emotion, it has a place within a healthy psyche. The problem isn't that we have hate; the problem is how we act on it, especially when we allow our deeply-ingrained beliefs and knee-jerk reactions to dictate our behavior. Rational, self-controlled people are capable of distancing themselves from their hate, that it's a mood and that it will pass - but if they think it's God's will that they must act on their hate, or if they just decide to act on their hate and leave God out of it, that is when they cross the line and cause problems for the world. Your hate is an irrational emotional response, just like your love, just like your faith, just like all the tempestuous feelings swirling around in your head. Treasure them, for they are part of what makes you who you are - but don't let them boss you around.

The reason I bring so much God into all this philosophy is quite simple: I want each of us to believe that we are God. You, whoever you are, you are God. Think about that. You are all-powerful, and what you are, the world around you is. I firmly believe that this is true of all of us, and that our refusal to acknowledge that fact is the root cause of all our problems. We are still clinging to imaginary non-Us gods, hoping that someone else will solve our problem for us, refusing to face the fact that it is our job. You, the reader: it's your job. You are one of the six billion people who are currently making the world the way it is. The fact that you are vastly outnumbered is not an excuse for you to give up, not a reason to fall into despair and apathy.

You have a job to do, for your own good, and for the benefit of everyone you care about, and everyone you don't care about, and the order of the cosmos itself. You must shoulder your one-sixbillionth of the burden. You must choose to do what you can to make your world worth living in. Don't wait for God to do it; don't wait for other people to do it. Don't be a spoiled child waiting for his parents to make everything better. Take responsibility. Recognize everything that is true about yourself, whether you like it or not, whether other people like it or not. Don't judge other people according to a standard that you yourself can't live up to - or if you must judge them, do so leniently, with understanding. With imagination.

Imagine yourself in their place, living their lives. Imagine that they were God, because they are. Imagine that you are God, because you are. Imagine that all of these Gods have a plan for how to change the world. Imagine that all these plans are different, that someone else has a plan that you hate, and that you have a plan that someone else hates. Because no matter who you are, no matter how good you are, someone hates you. And that's okay. It's not your job to make everyone like you. It's your job to be yourself, and let everyone else be themselves, and for everyone, themselves, to be God. You're all opposed to each other, all pursuing contradictory goals, but you don't have to share. You don't have to prove each other wrong. You're flawed and fallible and perfect and wonderful, unique just like everyone else, glorious and terrible and worthless like everyone else, and being all of those things is your job. Stopping other people from being those things is not your job.

You need to recognize what you are, and what other people are, and what the truth is. You don't have to change it, because you can't, it's not something you can do. But being someone who would change it if you could, that is something you can be. And that is your job. You must be yourself, even when others wish you wouldn't be yourself, even when you wish others wouldn't be themselves. You must hold fast to your beliefs, while not acting on them - because you don't have the right to do so. You don't have the right to do anything, technically. But you do have the right to BE anything. That is the purpose of the world - to limit what we can do, so that we can concentrate on what we should be.

That'd be a great world, wouldn't it? All of us at each other's throats, but never squeezing. All cooperating to survive this world, while planning to escape it separately. Treasuring our individual plans for perfection, recognizing them as impossible, doing what we have to do to survive in this imperfect world. Respecting others, accepting them for what they are, and not judging what they are, not trying to control what they are, but only what they do, and then only when it affects what we are. Forgiving others their flaws, as we would wish to be forgiven of ours, acting in the manner we want others to act. Well-behaved, but never ashamed. Generous in public, greedy in private, instead of the other way around. Together, we can change what we're able and entitled to change, and tolerate what we can't or shouldn't.

That is what we can do, by each being God.

Belated MLK-Day Observation - Racism is Stupid

I really ought to have posted something on Martin Luther King Day, being that he has always been one of my heroes for his tireless pursuit of a more enlightened world (along with Lincoln, Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau, plus a couple of dorks that went and founded religions or some dumb move like that, but were pretty righteous themselves at the time). Since I was busy at the time, here's something vaguely appropriate to the topic which I dug out of my old notes, so it's even more belated.

*******

Racism is stupid in the real world, because in the real world we don't know anything; you can't say for sure that all Chinese people are bad drivers, for example, because you haven't personally spoken to every Chinese person with a car in the world, let alone found out what all other Chinese people would be like if they suddenly gained a car. So you're judging on the basis of ignorance, and that's just dumb.

Now, in a created universe such as a fiction, you have the option of creating valid racial profiles, such as "all elves love the forest", and since you decreed it as a fact, it's true. But I'm of the opinion that this is lazy writing.

An open letter to those incensed by the Arizona shooting spree.

Everyone who is advocating capital punishment and/or vigilantism against this criminal, I have news for you.

Someone else in this world thinks, rightly or wrongly, that you deserve to suffer and die.

Yes, you.

No matter how good you are, you're never going to be good enough not to have at least one person who wants to torture you slowly to death because of something you've done that they think is wrong.

Think about that the next time you advocate removing bureaucratic impediments to acts of retribution.