Fuck You, Darwin

I've always hated strong people. My mom is a strong woman, and I hate her. I love her too, don't get me wrong; those two are not mutually exclusive like a lot of you have been taught. I love her for a lot of things about her that are good, but her capacity to be an unstoppable juggernaut who knocks down anything and everything in her path, stops at nothing to achieve her goal, is something I've always hated. She never accepts that she's beaten, just like me, but she doesn't settle for sitting around and fuming and wishing things could be different; she changes things, even if the only change she can make is for the worse. That's called strength, and I hate it.

I choose to be weak. I choose to do nothing rather than the wrong thing, and I believe that choice makes me noble. If you don't agree with that, then fine, that's you're right - and also fuck you for feeling that way, that's my purely personal response. You have every right to feel that way, and I objectively accept that; subjectively, I hate you for it. I hate a lot of things; we need more hate in the world.

You always hear about what a bad thing hate is, but it's not hate that is a problem, it's acting on hate. If you just don't like people of Type X, nobody gives a shit; you have every right to hate them for any reason or no reason. It's only a problem if you treat them poorly because of it. Your thoughts are your own, and they're wonderful no matter what they are; your actions are the part that needs accountability, the part where you have to be reasonable to others. Hate them all you like as long as you don't do anything about it.

We need more people willing to not do anything. I never want to do anything, and I hate myself about it. Hating yourself is a good thing, it makes you a little better prepared to deal with other people hating you. It's good practice. Thicken your skin, grow a spine, accept the hate and make it a part of you. Love your hate, and love yourself for being hateful. That's the answer right there.

Oh, and while we're talking about self-contradicting statements, here's another one, from 1984: Freedom is Slavery. That one's bullshit of course, but right under it is another one: Ignorance is Strength. That one's true, and you can find plenty of proof. Look at a lynch mob, or a stampede of frenzied bulls. Strong, and ignorant. If they took time to figure out what they were doing, they'd stop doing it, but then they'd be weak. Stopping and thinking is weakness; after all, strength is the capacity to exert force, and you can exert a lot more force if you don't care what you're exerting it on. You can drive faster if you don't watch where you're going, and that reckless speed makes you very good at smashing things that get in your way, like the aforementioned frenzied bulls. We need more weakness in this world. It shouldn't be the strong that survive, because they usually don't deserve to.

The Virtue of Omniscience

I have long believed in many notions that seem absurd to the conventional thinker, but which I feel to be fundamentally right on a deep, instinctive level. Here is one example.

It is always preferable that everyone should know everything. For instance, if someone knows exactly how to break into my house without being caught, and I know exactly how to catch him anyway and stop him without breaking a sweat, it's preferable to neither of us knowing those things. If someone knows my bank account password, that is fine as long as the bank knows that the person using my bank account password is not really me, and I know who the person trying to break into my account is, and that they have failed and where exactly they are, even why they were doing it. Maybe they legitimately need the money more than I do, and I know how to call the bank and let them know to allow them to get the money, and I'll know if they spend it for any other purpose. If you know how to destroy the world, you also know why you shouldn't (unless, factually and unarguably, you should, in which case you also know exactly what will happen after you destroy the world and why it is preferable to continued existence). An insane person knows he's insane, and knows how to be otherwise at any given moment; he doesn't use his knowledge in an insane way because he knows it would be insane to do so. You would even know how not to know a thing if you'd rather not know it, and you'd know that you opted not to know it and why, and could work around that knowledge as well as employ it.

Knowledge is only ever bad if it's inequitably distributed; we would all be best off having an infinite amount of it. The desire to keep secrets is a destructive twitch leftover from our caveman days, an irrational impulse that drives us to violence against those who breach our privacy rather than tolerate their knowledge of things which we feel shameful about. Fear, shame, wrath; they are all primitive emotions which omniscience would temporarily increase, only to eclipse and annihilate them in short order, leaving a world in which everyone is glad to be exactly what they are, and incapable of acting inappropriately (by a factual, not subjective and humanly flawed, definition of 'appropriate'). The faster we expand knowledge toward the infinite, the sooner we will begin to resemble the gods, who (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they do indeed exist) are omniscient and beyond our animal urges. Knowledge is literally what makes us divine, and so we should increase it ad infinitum.

The Bleak Certainty of Despair

None of my usual highfalutin' ideals today, I'm afraid. If you have an aversion to emo whining I'd suggest you skip this entry, because I'm in a dour mood indeed and I feel compelled to vent.

For years I've struggled knowingly with manic depression, after having not known that was what it was before. I've gotten past the point where it could control me as completely as it used to, but I still have entire weeks when nothing seems to go right and I'm just useless for accomplishing anything and can barely stand the thought of living to see another day. I know these moods pass and have banished the thought of doing anything irreversably drastic as a result of them, being sensible enough to realize that I have no right to deny my future self opporunities on the basis of my current moods. So I've taken refuge in a number of coping strategies, of which one of the most successful has been self-aggrandizement. I would imagine that what few virtues I do possess (writing talent, for example) might eventually earn the approval of some agency that was in the position to grant me ultimate power to make the world right according to my preferences, or at least to escape the world into a neverending fantasy that would fulfill my wildest dreams.

Today I confronted yet another of these bleak moods, promoted by a series of petty annoyances (and one not so petty one which puts my future, as in my having one at all, in serious question). And when I reached for my usual power trip, I found that the idea didn't satisfy me this time, because I realized that ultimately, my problem is an inability to stand the possibility of things going wrong in the future. Any current happiness is fleeting to me; no matter how much it satisfies me, the best it can hope to accomplish is to temporarily distract me from the knowledge that things could go horribly wrong tomorrow, condemning me in an instant to unbearable agony, degradation, terror, or any number of other fates I would give anything to avoid. But I saw today that there was nothing I could give, even if an entity of ultimate power were to offer me some bargain...for what that being could grant, it could also take away, for any reason or no reason, and I would have nothing but its word to suggest otherwise. Not being a person given to trust or faith, I couldn't believe that word, and so I would never feel secure, not even after being blessed by a benevolent deity with the fulfillment of my every whim. (That's not to say it might not be fun, but it would have to continue being fun forever or it would still fall under "temporary diversion"; I'd still never be content.)

So I see now that the adaptive nature which I've always believed was humanity's greatest strength, and also suspected was its greatest impulse, indeed has me by the balls even more thoroughly than I had suspected. There is no gift I can be given which would entirely and eternally free me from the fear of pain, disgust, and fear itself. Today I am legitimately a being without hope, and I recognize that I will be overcome with fear for the rest of my days, that short of the complete obliteration of my personality (which I would not submit to even if I trusted that the method employed was capable of doing the job right, and I certainly have no such faith in modern medical methods), nothing can ever set me fully at ease. Right now, the only thing I have to live for is a vague sense of gratitude toward my parents for having put up with me when I was terminally unemployed and seemed incapable of ever amounting to anything. I've made something of myself, but it's a something I don't much like, and I legitimately wish I would simply cease to exist forever (not simply dying, mind, for that makes no guarantees regarding any afterlife), because I see no other way I can be guaranteed never to suffer the worst fates I can imagine, and those fates are so frightening to me that no reward would be great enough for me to be able to accept the risk.

That's where I am today - nowhere, and going nowhere. To be very explicit, this isn't a "cry for help" and suicide is not on the table as an option; I simply have the bleak realization that life brings me no satisfaction, and probably never will again. I will eventually escape this mood, and you'll hear me ranting about how perfect the world could be if we all did X, Y and Z, and I'll believe it wholeheartedly and disavow this dour mood as just a depressive episode, over quickly and better forgotten. I'm not going to try and say otherwise; I just know as of now that this darkness will always return to snuff out all my joys, and that I can think of no way to guarantee it won't.

EDIT - Just to put things in perspective here, it's an hour later and I feel somewhat better. This in no way means I don't still believe as I did above, only that I've been distracted from that belief and am no longer fixated upon it. Like I said, I've learned that these moods come and go, so I need to take them with a grain of salt.

A Brief Note on The Emotional Rollercoaster

"If you can't handle me at my worst, you sure as Hell don't deserve me at my best."
--Marilyn Monroe

I've been knowingly rocking the bipolar lifestyle for at least a good half-decade now; back when I was a teenager I didn't know what was happening, but I eventually accepted that mood swings and bouts of either hyperactivity or severe lassitude were just a part of who I was. There's no denying that the short end of the stick doth mightily suck - "depression" is a misleading word, because it's really not sadness, it's glumness, a sense of utter despair and frustration where everything seems pointless, where you feel that the very things you most want to do are a waste of time and not worth the effort of bothering to do them. But I've learned to pay a lot of attention to myself, and I've found that those feelings always pass in time; it's just a question of finding a way to get through it. And in learning how to make that happen, how to accept a certain proportion of uselessness in myself, I've become stronger and more balanced than I think I ever could be if I simply took a pill to make my brain 'normal'.

I've lost a lot of friends because of this attitude, and that's one of the things that bums me out when I'm on the downslope. I wish they'd stick with me through thick and thin, but I don't blame them much for not granting that wish, as it's a massively selfish and unreasonable one, one I would never grant to someone else who claimed to deserve such loyalty while virtually guaranteeing they would never return it to any real extent. But while I have regrets, I don't consider them a reason to change. The highs are still worth the lows, and one of the things that gets me through in the dark times is the knowledge that, at the end of the day, I have been myself, and there can be no more pure purposes to my existence than that.

(Disclaimer: I have no medical or psychological proof of any of this. Perhaps a "professional" would decide manic-depression isn't the technically precise name for my condition; I really don't especially care, it's how I view the condition and I think being the one who has to live with it gives me the necessary diagnostic credentials. Still, don't skip out on taking your butt to a doctor just because I told you so; make the decision on the strength of your own ability to determine right from wrong, and give it a good lot of thought from every angle you can come up with.)

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.