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.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Have I Found Myself Lost?
Damn, it's been a long time since I updated here. My blogger instincts, nascent as they were in the first place, have still managed to atrophy. There has been a lot of not-very-significant change in my life recently, and it's hard to sort out what is worth talking about. Still, I feel a need to try, so instead of completing one of the several drafts that I have laying around which I've never actually published, I'll write a whole new entry developed from a single paragraph I wrote in frustration at work.
The drum I've been marching to lately has been a sense of profound disgust and dissatisfaction with the nature of our very reality. Everywhere around me I see evidence of how fundamentally flawed human psychology is, and how many wrong decisions people have made in the dim past and then continued to uphold as valuable cultural traditions. These frustrations have come out in my work life and have pushed me to the edge of losing my job - that I dislike my job intensely on a number of levels means that in a way I almost want to lose it, yet in a much more immediate and practical way, doing so would be suicidal, as the economy's ruined state means that a person of my sort cannot count on ever being able to sell his rather inspecific skills when he can't be humble enough to beg the approval of an employer. And so my frustration festers, having no healthy outlet and a disastrous surfeit of unhealthy ones, of which this blog is one of the least unhealthy and thus one of the easiest ones to forget. Such is the Ouroborean nature of our world's torment of us.
Still, I refuse to give up hope. Though the Earth may seem ruled by a tyrant God who cares only that he is obeyed, though the Adversary seems to have warped the very processes of life in order to make the most horrifying parasites and predators also the greatest evolutionary successes, though we seem guranteed to be devalued as human beings, considered entitled to neither the basics of life nor the mercy of death but prisoned forever in a parody of discomfort and slow decrepitude, thus that actual agony and horror is actually preferable just for its novelty...still I have the gall to believe that our world can be saved, that we do not need to accept that misery is our only lot. I read a couple Cracked.com articles on anger management and the fragility of the Internet recently, and recognized that they were like warning signs to my embattled perspective; they've diminished my sense of needing to fight back against the injustice I see all around me, but not by much. And so still I find myself writing, and wishing to publicize, sayings such as this:
"There can be no higher authority than the judgment of a wise person in matters of his own responsibility. Crime is a consequence of failure to understand the consequences of your actions; no one would ever commit a crime if we were all wise, and causing us all to be wise is much more worthwhile than forbidding us all from crimes, as such forbiddance cannot be perfectly enforced. The only way human beings can be trusted to do the right thing is if they are given the ability to determine it absolutely, and then allowed to self-motivate in its pursuit. No one can force us to do the right thing; they can only empower us to perceive it and trust that we know what's good for us."
Perhaps I'm not being very objective, but as I look upon these words I wrote three days ago, the very day that I was given a final "toe the line or else" warning at my job, I find that they still seem profound and meaningful. Why is it that, when a man like me pens a commandment like this, people do not abandon their obviously-dysfunctional way of life in order to try out the new way? Why do we continue to obey laws which we know are obsolete, work at jobs we consider pointless, vote for politicians we know are only out to line their pockets at our expense, and then obediently do whatever someone tells us when they put a gun to our head in order to force us to betray our principles? Why is it so impossible for people to behave as beings of higher reason, instead of as spastic animals who hate their lives yet would do anything to avoid dying?
I can see so many clearly-correct solutions to the world's problems, and all they would require is one tiny miracle to make them work. Could we not conjure that miracle if we directed our will in sufficient numbers? How many people must refuse to fear the gun before they actually become bulletproof? Why is it that everyone sells out, when no-one selling out would render money powerless to enslave us? Why do people cling foolishly to the words of long-dead prophets, willing to kill their neighbor over a differing interpretation of just one word in their holy book? It is easy to look at these tragic paradoxes and believe that we are doomed, that this world's nature is atrocity and that all hope is false. Yet I cannot make myself believe this. I still nurture the flame of Hope within me...and I still believe that if enough other people would feed me the fuel for that spark, or at least stop standing between me and a forest I can set alight, that I could still be our Lightbringer, and free us from the chains of our intolerable universe.
The drum I've been marching to lately has been a sense of profound disgust and dissatisfaction with the nature of our very reality. Everywhere around me I see evidence of how fundamentally flawed human psychology is, and how many wrong decisions people have made in the dim past and then continued to uphold as valuable cultural traditions. These frustrations have come out in my work life and have pushed me to the edge of losing my job - that I dislike my job intensely on a number of levels means that in a way I almost want to lose it, yet in a much more immediate and practical way, doing so would be suicidal, as the economy's ruined state means that a person of my sort cannot count on ever being able to sell his rather inspecific skills when he can't be humble enough to beg the approval of an employer. And so my frustration festers, having no healthy outlet and a disastrous surfeit of unhealthy ones, of which this blog is one of the least unhealthy and thus one of the easiest ones to forget. Such is the Ouroborean nature of our world's torment of us.
Still, I refuse to give up hope. Though the Earth may seem ruled by a tyrant God who cares only that he is obeyed, though the Adversary seems to have warped the very processes of life in order to make the most horrifying parasites and predators also the greatest evolutionary successes, though we seem guranteed to be devalued as human beings, considered entitled to neither the basics of life nor the mercy of death but prisoned forever in a parody of discomfort and slow decrepitude, thus that actual agony and horror is actually preferable just for its novelty...still I have the gall to believe that our world can be saved, that we do not need to accept that misery is our only lot. I read a couple Cracked.com articles on anger management and the fragility of the Internet recently, and recognized that they were like warning signs to my embattled perspective; they've diminished my sense of needing to fight back against the injustice I see all around me, but not by much. And so still I find myself writing, and wishing to publicize, sayings such as this:
"There can be no higher authority than the judgment of a wise person in matters of his own responsibility. Crime is a consequence of failure to understand the consequences of your actions; no one would ever commit a crime if we were all wise, and causing us all to be wise is much more worthwhile than forbidding us all from crimes, as such forbiddance cannot be perfectly enforced. The only way human beings can be trusted to do the right thing is if they are given the ability to determine it absolutely, and then allowed to self-motivate in its pursuit. No one can force us to do the right thing; they can only empower us to perceive it and trust that we know what's good for us."
Perhaps I'm not being very objective, but as I look upon these words I wrote three days ago, the very day that I was given a final "toe the line or else" warning at my job, I find that they still seem profound and meaningful. Why is it that, when a man like me pens a commandment like this, people do not abandon their obviously-dysfunctional way of life in order to try out the new way? Why do we continue to obey laws which we know are obsolete, work at jobs we consider pointless, vote for politicians we know are only out to line their pockets at our expense, and then obediently do whatever someone tells us when they put a gun to our head in order to force us to betray our principles? Why is it so impossible for people to behave as beings of higher reason, instead of as spastic animals who hate their lives yet would do anything to avoid dying?
I can see so many clearly-correct solutions to the world's problems, and all they would require is one tiny miracle to make them work. Could we not conjure that miracle if we directed our will in sufficient numbers? How many people must refuse to fear the gun before they actually become bulletproof? Why is it that everyone sells out, when no-one selling out would render money powerless to enslave us? Why do people cling foolishly to the words of long-dead prophets, willing to kill their neighbor over a differing interpretation of just one word in their holy book? It is easy to look at these tragic paradoxes and believe that we are doomed, that this world's nature is atrocity and that all hope is false. Yet I cannot make myself believe this. I still nurture the flame of Hope within me...and I still believe that if enough other people would feed me the fuel for that spark, or at least stop standing between me and a forest I can set alight, that I could still be our Lightbringer, and free us from the chains of our intolerable universe.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
The Impossible Dream
The inestimable Douglas Adams included an interesting idea in his most famous novel, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"; he said that human beings are capable of flying, but that it almost never happens because in order to fly, you have to "throw yourself at the ground but accidentally miss". He emphasizes that you can't miss on purpose; you have to be trying your best to splatter yourself against the earth and coincidentally fail. Which creates an interesting implication - in deliberately trying to get yourself killed, but failing through no fault of your own, you can do the impossible.
The idea is rather similar to something you see happen a lot in a more widely popular medium: Hanna-Barbera cartoons, most commonly those featuring Wile E. Coyote. In these cartoons, it is quite common for a character who is intent on some mission to walk off the edge of a cliff and travel effortlessly along a path through the air, only abruptly falling when he suddenly realizes he's left the comfort of solid ground. Like the Douglas Adams version, this theory of subjective gravity emphasizes that you can't deliberately remain in midair, but rather can fail to notice that you're doing so, and thus not have to answer to the gravity you're not currently aware of. These two fictions can teach us an important fact.
It may not be possible to defy gravity through absent-mindedness, but it is possible to go to sleep (despite all the evidence to the contrary which I am currently presenting, as I write this three hours after the latest I should normally have turned in for the day so as to maintain my nocturnal schedule). And going to sleep means withdrawing your consciousness from the external reality, entering the realm of dreams, a plane of the miraculous where you can do anything you can imagine and nothing can permanently harm you (there are a few downsides, involving lack of conscious volition and possible a certain blunting of sensory input, but overall the majority of people seem to find their dreams more or less pleasant most of the time, and those who take the time to cultivate lucid dreaming skills can find the experience even more rewarding). Much as with freedom from gravity, freedom from consciousness of the external universe is a liberating and immensely rewarding experience - and impossible to do on command.
As pointed out in the movie "Inception", no one ever notices the beginning of a dream. In order to dream, you must first let your mind go blank; only after that does your brain begin rebuilding your consciousness for the day, starting with the aimless experiences of dreams which keep you occupied until your thought processes fully reactivate, and can be used to propel your waking body again. You can't just suddenly decide to dream; all you can decide to do is try to turn off your mind and wait for the dream to form around you before pulling you into it mid-scene. And turning your brain off and sleeping, like missing the ground and flying, is something you cannot do on purpose. You have to wait until your attention wanders of its own accord, and not notice that you're busy being awake, just like Wile E. Coyote needs to not notice he's left the ground. As you attempt to drift off, every flicker of sensory input other than darkness, white noise, and minor body awareness threatens to slam you back into your body, just like gravity slamming Coyote into the ground; there is, therefore, a certain element of Luck involved in the fact that we ever get to sleep at all.
I've not yet mentioned my personal religion on this blog, I don't think; time to fix that. I don't try too hard to convince others to believe as I do, and I certainly don't want to make other people worship my particular gods; they are totems I picked out from various world religions because I had a personal appreciation for what they represent. But I think most people could do worse than to consider the central tenet of my spirituality: the gods exist only in your mind, and that is where all their power must operate. Regardless of what you call God, he almost certainly can't lift a rock for you, and He very probably can't change an enemy into a friend, but one thing He might be able to do is change your mind, since that's where He lives. Since you are His host, he won't start moving your mental funiture around without your permission, but if you ask Him (or Her; I find that my desire to worship anything without breasts is never terribly strong) to help you out with some task that involves only your own mind, He might be able to do something. Technically, it's you that's doing it - even the atheists can get in on this form of prayer, because it doesn't require any belief, although the non-volitional mind of the faithful may be helpful for the same reason that a short attention span helps Wile E. Coyote to delay his pratfalls. But whether it involves faith or not, the action of focusing on a living symbol such as a deity may be helpful in achieving some of these frustratingly impossible-to-guarantee tasks that Life throws our way.
So if we need Luck to find our way to Dreamland, and God exists only in our mind, then guess what? Lady Luck is a Goddess, She can live in you if you want Her to, and maybe, just maybe, she can help you get the Luck you need.
Sweet dreams.
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.
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.
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