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.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
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?
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?
Saturday, June 4, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, May 27, 2011
(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.)
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.)
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
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."
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."
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, April 11, 2011
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 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.
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