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.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
