Kill Your Idols (It's a Static X Song Title, Chill Out)

As much as we're inclined to tribalize around our shared preferences for a writer, an artist, a musician, a politician, or a cult leader, the truth is that interest is not the same of affiliation. Beware of assuming that someone who shares your likes and dislikes is actually alike with you; there are assholes in every population, including the ones that you also happen to belong to. The presence of assholes in a group doesn't indicate that there's something wrong with the group, nor does the presence of saintly souls redeem a group from all its collective misdeeds. Keep this in mind when you turn to some role model for guidance and seek to emulate their ideology.

Lights, Camera, Inaction

The entertainment industry is pioneered by visionaries but ruled by tinpot tyrants. Studio executives are small-minded, uncreative twerps who are terrified of taking chances and eager to take advantage of the stupid and easily manipulated. They are the only ones who have the cash to bankroll movies, but they got that cash by manipulating people, and they plan to manipulate people more to earn it back; creating a masterwork of historic impact is too risky for them.

There are many movies which have literally changed my life. "The Neverending Story" taught me at an early age that the imagination was the difference between life and death; "Star Wars" came along not much later and showed me Good triumphing over Evil because destiny was on its side. "Independence Day" may have been my first serious glimpse of the idea that existence was fragile, and during my rebellious teen years, "The Matrix" taught me to doubt the reality of that which lies before my eyes. Most recently, James Cameron's "Avatar" is not only a feast for the senses but a profound exploration of the question of identity. These are the masterworks of the field, but they are only the exceptional percent of a percent; for every work of genius, there are a thousand cheap, corny knockoffs that exist only to make money, and they take up space and time (to say nothing of money and energy) which distracts from the worthy works. It varies exactly how much I am bothered by that fact; sometimes I can accept it as a necessary evil, while other times I feel like crying out for revolution.

I have only scratched the surface of this topic; expect to hear a lot more about the sacred deceptions of Hollywood and my many joys and sorrows relating to them.

Superman For President

It has long been fashionable in our society to judge people, to dismiss them as unsalvageable, to condemn them and punish them for deeds we view as incorrect; such punishment only widens the rift which separates them from society and motivates their misdeeds. This must end; we must cease to punish and begin to correct instead. Let us abandon untenable ideas about free will and laissez-faire which do not function in the world as it exists; all people can behave in an ideal, enlightened fashion, but not if they're given the option to do otherwise. As long as humans are free to choose, they will make bad choices. That is why the choice must be taken away from them, not by other humans, but by a super-human.

All that is needed to overturn our current, imperfect status quo is a single perfect being, one miraculous individual who possesses absolute wisdom, flawless compassion, and the power to single-handedly dethrone the self-appointed kings of the world, who climbed to power on a mountain of corpses by spinning a web of lies to support themselves. Our unseen masters have engineered the world to support their way of being, their selfish and contentious paradigm in which the weak feed upon the weak so that they may never rise up to tear down the strong. This must not stand; the world itself must rise up and demand an ends to the Darwinism of the world.

We have been indoctrinated to believe that it is the only way; breaking that programming will not be taking our freedom away, but granting it to us again - the freedom to do as we should, instead of as we're told.

Mental Health

It is no accident that I named this blog as I did; I have always felt that my neuroses were a gift, that they were the source of my uniqueness and ability to see beyond the boundaries of life as we know it. However, those who walk around with their head in the clouds have a habit of stubbing toes and falling off cliffs; I hit such an impediment recently and have officially decided that I need some medicine and/or therapy to take the edge off some of my more debilitating conditions. Ultimately, my insights into possible higher realities and ways of exploring them, either with our imaginations or through miraculous technological advancement, do little good if I am so thoroughly paralyzed by the miseries of my day-to-day existence that I am never able to actually work on organizing my thoughts into some sort of coherent useful structure. An aversion to structure and an aversion to medicine have been parts of who I felt I was in the past, but for the first time I'm aware of, I have deliberately rather than subconsciously opted to discard these notions and try to steer the direction of my personal evolution toward something slightly easier to live with. If this experiment does produce a notable diminution in my creative or imaginative abilities, then I will worry about figuring out how to keep the two in balance; for now, my long-standing assumption that mundanity would take a mile if I gave it an inch has proved itself too much not-fun for me to maintain it any more. I believe I shall still be equally blessed by madness even after I've discarded one or two relatively boring components of my neurosis; the idea that they were all inextricably interlinked no longer rings true to me.

Seething Over Corporatism

Corporations are not entitled to have a self-preservation right; a company that serves society as best it can while still surviving has not yet given as much as it must. Groups and collectives of individuals do not have the rights that those individuals themselves do; they exist only because society permits them to, and I say that they have a moral imperative to exist only for society's benefit. A company's profits should always be reinvested in the company to make it better able to serve its customers; the executives are entitled to only as much money as the actual work they do would indicate. That our society fails to recognize this basic truth, and continues to allow robber barons to "buy the rights" to something and rake in obscene amounts of cash for the hard work of legions of minions - it infuriates me. That these people are criminals and thieves is so absurdly obvious that I can't believe there aren't thousands of people lining up for the opportunity to shoot them. Why does it seem that only I have a moral center, that I seem to be the only person who wants things to be different?

For the moment, I still have enough common sense to realize the answer: I am not the only person who wants things to be different, there are many people who feel exactly as I do, and who fail to put their money where their mouth is exactly as I do. I'm not willing to trade my life for that of some fatcat who hurts the world just by existing; ergo, I am in no position to ask anyone else to do so either. My frustration is understandable, but impossible to act upon in any reasonable or realistic way.

Kill Your Fear of Death!

One of the most dominant factors of my recent life has been my association with a tiny Internet message board that about 20 people in the entire world have ever heard of. It started when I was on the official forums for the card game Magic: the Gathering, which I have played for 15 years and discussed on its forums for the past 6 of them; I got tired of having several posts of mine to those forums deleted for being too controversial and breaking the impossibly vague Terms of Service of that site, calling the non-democratic nature of message board softare into focus and making me feel that my freedom of speech had been sacrificed on an altar of other people's squeamishness and the company's fear of a frivolous lawsuit or the like. One of the posters on the boards who I had occasionally encountered, a woman who I will call "Nancy" to protect her real name and forum identifier, had decided to learn HTML at the time, and was apparently also getting tired of the Magic forums, though for a different reason. So to further her web-design education, she started a forum, and invited me and about 10 other people from the Magic forums to join it. There, we would be free to swear, make crude jokes, impugn the company's good name, and flame each other as much as we could handle (several of us had been branded trolls on the Magic forums, myself included, although I never wanted the arguments that I unintentionally created, so if I was a troll it was not on purpose).

So for the past year or so, I've been on "Nancy's" forum, and in that time, we've disagreed often, and with increasing strenuousness. She has known this whole time that one of my hot-button issues is the deletion of my forum posts, and until recently, even when we were in the deepest strife and hated each other's guts thoroughly, she never threatened to do that to me. But apparently, I just hadn't pushed hard enough; recently, I finally did, crossed one line too many and had her threaten to do exactly this. Whenever we would disagree severely, I would try to take a conciliatory tone and behave myself to avoid further aggravating her, because I was afraid to lose access to the forum and the record of my presence there.

But finally, this last time, I got so sick of her my-way-or-the-highway attitude (perfectly justified since she was the one doing the work of running the forum, but just because it's fair and logical doesn't mean I have to like it) that I decided I didn't even care if she deleted my profile and all my posts; I had fought so hard to avoid this miniature virtual "death", for so long, that it was liberating to finally accept the possibility of it happening because I was too tired of trying to avoid it. Those who have read a certain graphic novel, or watched the movie adapted from it over the writer's objections, will recall that the main plot twist of the entire work is a manifestation of this same principle. (I do not name that work as an attempt to avoid spoiling the plot; those who have read it know what it is, and those who never will can deduce its identity with moderate trouble from the information in this paragraph, but those considering reading the book or watching the movie hopefully won't know at this point which of the many works of that author I'm talking about and can still be surprised when they find out.)

I'm not yet prepared to say that this is a good experience across the board, nor will I advocate that anyone or everyone pursue it, and I certainly won't advise flirting with literal deaths instead of metaphorical ones in hopes of liberating oneself from what may be a perfectly sensible and healthy degree of fear. All I'm saying, under these exact circumstances and for myself personally, it seems to have worked out well, and this is a revelation I believed was worthy of sharing.

Philosophies of Life

I believe that the purpose of life is to figure out what the purpose of life is; I think people can only really answer the big questions themselves, or else the answers won't mean much to them. However, I also think it's perfectly natural for every person to think their answer is the One True Answer, and as long as they don't act all surprised that others don't agree, or try to force those others to agree, their feeling that those others are fools for not agreeing is perfectly reasonable. Each of us is the center of a universe built for one; there's nothing wrong with that. However, it is often fun for us to look beyond and see what others think, disregarding their opinion if it does not suit us, and assimilating it as our own if it does. To that end, here are my personal answers, the conclusions to which I have come in the course of my life.

I believe that the universe we live in has a purpose; it may have been created by an intelligence or randomly generated from the ocean of possibility, but either way its existence here and now accomplishes something. That purpose is to create Ideas; the cosmos is a factory for thoughts, concepts, perspectives and potential truths, and we human beings are the workstations on the assembly line. Our purpose is to think, and thereby generate ideas; for that reason, the extent to which a person is fulfilling their purpose in existence is determined by the quantity, quality, and uniqueness of their thoughts. Your whims, your feelings, your fantasies, your ideals - all of these are why you are alive, they are what you accomplish by living, they are what the universe needs from you. You should treasure them, cultivate them, record them, perfect them, and share them with others, expecting of course that others will not always be appreciative; by refining and transforming your ideas over the course of a lifetime, you contribute to the infinite body of human knowledge and thought, whose generation I consider the only reason why Reality ever needed to exist.

While my concept of ethics is relative and situational, and I try to beware of making absolutist statements about what people should and shouldn't do since the answers are seldom easy enough to put into a pithy statement, I do think a few moral precepts follow from my belief, and that they would be good ones to live by. Since a person's ideas are the whole reason they exist, others should respect those ideas and not try to limit his or her ability to express them. A person's ideas are synonymous with that person's value, and should themselves be valued; it's fine to believe an idea has no usefulness in practical terms, but to say someone has no right to even think such a thing is basically the same as saying that person has no right to exist - their thoughts are their existence, their beliefs and personality being all that truly exists of them. The flesh and the world are transient; we know they inevitably succumb to death and destruction in time. But the spark of personality, the "soul" if you will, remains an unknown quantity whose existence cannot be disproven, and whose ultimate fate if it does exist is unknown; for that reason, we should assume it exists, as we will cause less harm by pretending it is real than we would if we failed to acknowledge it when it really was.

Ultimately, the ability of the written word to express what we mean is limited; our thoughts do not always fit neatly into words, as the existence of multiple human languages for a single human race can attest. We do the best we can to communicate, but we should always keep in mind that the words tell only part of the story, and should not judge others too harshly based on what they say. Nor should we be too hard on them for the sake of what they do; reality forces many people to behave in a less than ideal fashion, so a sense of proportion and situational awareness will serve better than any dogmatic code in determining how to judge a person's actions.

This is of course only the beginnings of a belief system; as my life continues, I will constantly revise and improve these ideals. For now, I do not ask that anyone do anything other than consider my words. But I think it is a realistic possibility that these ideals will eventually evolve into a more sophisticated understanding of how and why the game of life should be played than any previous culture has achieved. It's only natural that today's Internet age is capable of producing a synthesis of all human thought never before seen; even when I am not feeling so arrogant as to believe I will personally achieve that ultimate ethos, I seldom fail to believe that I will at least be a major contributor toward its eventual realization.