I have something particularly on my mind today and that is always there to some degree. This is something I hesitate to talk about because talk is cheap. Talking about it is an affront to real change and really only serves to strengthen the enemy. This subject is probably the most-widely-bitched-about and the least done-anything-about. It's a cliche. You're sick of hearing about it. Hearing about it from me isn't going to change your life or probably even your outlook. You could say this post is a moment of weakness; a desire to express my feelings of helplessness and hopelessness about a world I perceive as broken.
We could start anywhere, really, but let's start with corporations. One-hundred and fifty years ago, corporations were exceptionally rare and only chartered for short times to serve in the interests of the public good. They gained more ground after the American Civil War was fought and the 14th Amendment was legislated. This legislation was intended to grant citizenship to former slaves. It was intended to ensure that no person could be stripped of life, liberty, or property without due process.
Soon after, lawyers twisted this amendment to apply to corporations as well as individuals, as indeed, a corporation was legally considered a person under law. By 1896, 150 cases had been heard by the Supreme Court regarding the 14th amendment. 15 involved blacks. 135 involved business entities who had hired lawyers to advance their interests.
Since then, we have seen a steady increase in the power wielded by corporations. Their rights and powers have long since surpassed simple individuals and now rival governments. In the year 2000, humanity reached a vital yet relatively obscure landmark: 51 of the world's top 100 GDPs were claimed by corporations. In the years since, rule is increasingly marked by a cooperation between these corporations and government. The landscapes of our lives are increasingly determined by Nike and Monsanto and Shell reaching an equilibrium with our government rather than anything more meaningful and relatable to the individual.
You might be thinking to yourself that this isn't so bad. After all, corporations provide us with products and services that improve our lives, right? Well, you're right and you're wrong. The problem with corporations is that it is incredibly difficult to hold them accountable for anything, and if they are, it is rarer still that it ends with a revocation of their charter. The trend is toward larger and more impersonable corporations as each has the right to buy another corporation.
Their single greatest flaw is that, in fact, they are obligated by law to seek profits for their shareholders above any other interest, including any consideration for social and environmental impact. This astounds me. The only saving grace here, for me, is to constantly remind myself that corporate laws were drafted in a time when corporations were not the primary institutions of our society. I don't think anyone in the 19th century could have imagined how pervasive they would become.
It chills my bones to think that there is actually very little control over a corporation; even by its own CEO! Robert Keergan, former CEO of Goodyear Tire, went on record in 2006 as saying that his own hands were tied and that he does not have the freedom to run his business the way he desires. In context, the insinuation seemed to be that morally reprehensible things were being done in the name of money. If even the CEO of a company can't control the runaway behemoth, then who can? The shareholders have managed to legally wash their own hands of the situation, instituting a one-way obligation whereby they demand monetary performance at any cost while being absolved of any responsibility for the methodology used.
Simply put, we've created a runaway monster that is controlled by nobody and is ruining our lives. The only incentive here is money. What kind of genius decided that the best way to structure human interaction was by the unending pursuit of money? Why isn't 500 million dollars enough? Why does a corporation need to grow its profits to a billion? Is there really any difference? Why is it that corporations spend billions every year to indoctrinate our children to want products they don't really need?
Why is advertising even an occupation, anyway? If we consider sheer utility, it would be far better to have advertisers doing something of real, rather than imagined, value. With more advertisers working in production, we'd be able to produce more widgets per hour than otherwise.
The sad truth of the matter is that we've long since passed the point of critical production. There's only so many cars and doo-dads we really need, and at some point, corporations need to manufacture our desires so we'll continue to buy. Advertising may not hold any intrinsic value, but you better believe it improves the bottom line or they wouldn't be employed. You can be certain that anything a corporation does improves its bottom line, since that was what they were designed to do, and nothing else. You can also be sure that corporations wouldn't have so-called 'green' movements and community-giving policies if these didn't improve the bottom line.
Requiring corporations to throw up friendly facades is not enough. I think it's time we acknowledge this structure of society for what it really is: a grand failed experiment. It's time to move on.
Do they honestly think we're supposed to be happy working for them? Chances are, if you work for a corporation, your job is not only unnecessary, but harmful to the overall well-being of humans. Think about it: does a corporation really care about you other than how much money you can make for them? Why is it that so often a corporation subjects us to crises of conscience, and there seems to be no one to whom to turn to do the right thing? No one's really in control, and no one really cares. It's a very anesthetizing institution.
Do they honestly think we're supposed to be happy coming in and doing the same repetitive shit day in and day out that almost anyone could learn to do in a short time? Do they honestly think we won't find it repulsive that our jobs help put human lives at risk, and for what?* Is the commodity we produce really important enough to warrant all the injustices that we as workers suffer on a daily basis, not to mention the risks consumers inherit and the alienation we unleash on all people by corporatized life?
It starts from a very early age—in school. They start hounding you about "the standards to which the next level of school will hold you, so you'd better shape up, gee golly!" And then once you get to the next level, they hound you about how college won't hold your hand, and then later the work force. They besiege us with exhortations to improve our image so we can get hired. They show us how to compose resumes and implore us to seek credentials so that we can find a place in the working world.
As a schoolkid, I always bucked against that kind of crap when it came up. I felt alienated, isolated, alone, and like everyone was suffering from delusions. Like no one could understand why I hated their resumes and their colleges and their lives so frenetic that you didn't have any time for self-direction. I quickly saw the disconnect between the credentials that employers so seem to adore and actual ability, and I wanted to live my life in accordance with my hatred for that particular hypocrisy. I saw that most people who pursue higher education do so only for the perceived economic advantage it will grant them, and this made me sick. A place that supposedly holds nobler ideals than the rest of society has indeed become infected with that same monetary cancer, and it shows. Half of students who attend public universities don't graduate, but they'll still gladly take your money. For-profit private schools have a much worse graduation rate: 20%. We're not stupid. We pick up on the motives and goals of these institutions.
You know, kids are smart. We're dumb. They're not. Would you like to know why? No kid ever tells you he wants to be an advertiser or an accountant when he grows up. Kids inherently know what's up. Instead of beating every last bit of sense out of them so they'll be compliant with the insanity we label the workforce, we ought to encourage their paradigm and see where it leads. I think one thing's for certain; no kid would ever screw up so much as to structure society primarily around profit incentive.
We now live in a world where a large majority of our food is produced from seeds designed to suicide themselves each year so that Monsanto can make a buck. We live in a world where Bechtel colluded with the Bolivian government to outlaw the use of rainwater so that residents could be charged up to one quarter of their income for water.
We live in a world where image is everything, and where corporations and governments slowly ensure that our environments become less and less sustaining so that we have no choice but to work for them doing monotonous tasks and spending our time in undignified ways.
What's the solution for me? I don't know. There doesn't seem to be any room in this world for me. It's clear to me that people don't give a damn about their fellow man. That's for sure. We continue to funnel them into the same broken systems we had to endure ourselves and turn a blind eye to the bullshit that we know it is. No one has the courage to stand up to these bogus experiments that weren't around a couple generations ago. They have indeed provided us with some interesting things. But I think it's worth it to question the worth of it all. I always seem to fall on the "no" side.
What does it mean to care for each other? Well, to me, that means find out what each person really wants, and help them attain it. When parents can't even be trusted to do that—when we can't even muster to courage to tell our parents and loved ones what we actually want, then this bullshit will continue.
To me..
to care for your fellow man means to create sustaining, nurturing, lasting environments. The sort of place that will act as a stable base so that each person can pursue their own desires without the constant desperation that modern life mandates. It's so easy to do logistically. It's so damn easy. Yet humans have decided to fuck themselves over and pattern the very fundamentals such that this kind of setup is all but impossible. I don't have much faith in you. That may change someday, but right now, it's difficult to see most of you as anything but uncaring, power-craving brutes who'd sell me the rope to hang myself with if you could make a dollar.
What will I do? Well, again, I don't know. I don't mean to say that I have it particularly bad. I'm all too aware of my good fortune for being born in this time and place, but I also know that I am particularly harder hit than most of my peers by this setup that I see as egregiously cold and uncaring. Seeing as how I am mostly prevented from living the kind of life I'd like to lead, I suppose all I can do is cloister myself away and hope that I can carve a niche somewhere in the image of it.
*If you do something noble for a living, congratulations. Not all of us have that luxury.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Give me enough time, and I will find a new way to say devotion.
I met a fellow once, who walked alone
from hermitages, temples, shrines and such.
Devoted, yes, ascetic, he had known
of hunger and of seeking Heaven's touch.
He asked me where I journeyed, and I said
that I was lost, misguided, and afraid.
He placed a callused hand upon my head
and told me of a place he once had stayed.
I thanked him for his kindness, and I sat,
my meal sat like a weight upon my chest.
Still half remained; I cursed myself for that:
I never thought to offer him the rest.
So openly we seek Your love and grace,
and hypocrites, we fail to see Your face.
The zeal that led me here is pale and weak;
Your mercy shows now even as I live.
Your Earth, inherited by one so meek
is vastly more than I would ask You give.
The land beneath my feet is as I am,
a temporary thing in endless time.
You drive us as the shepherd drives the lamb,
and slaughter some before they reach their prime.
And as the city towers fell and burned,
You turned a judge's ear toward our pleas.
You lingered overhead until You learned
To love the sight of humans on their knees.
If poorly I can serve, then serve I shall,
until as towers, I, too, burn and fall.
I came here with my words and You in mind,
presuming I had seven songs to write.
However, on arrival now, I find
unworthy words, deficient in Your sight.
Perhaps I could placate You if I knew
your preference in pattern, scheme, and form,
but poetry as pitiful as dust
is fair to you as worship from a worm.
A Lord and King of Kings upon Your throne,
no child of man can offer You a crown;
what can I give, that I and not You own?
Even my life by You was handed down.
To write another crown for You would be
a demonstration of futility.
from hermitages, temples, shrines and such.
Devoted, yes, ascetic, he had known
of hunger and of seeking Heaven's touch.
He asked me where I journeyed, and I said
that I was lost, misguided, and afraid.
He placed a callused hand upon my head
and told me of a place he once had stayed.
I thanked him for his kindness, and I sat,
my meal sat like a weight upon my chest.
Still half remained; I cursed myself for that:
I never thought to offer him the rest.
So openly we seek Your love and grace,
and hypocrites, we fail to see Your face.
The zeal that led me here is pale and weak;
Your mercy shows now even as I live.
Your Earth, inherited by one so meek
is vastly more than I would ask You give.
The land beneath my feet is as I am,
a temporary thing in endless time.
You drive us as the shepherd drives the lamb,
and slaughter some before they reach their prime.
And as the city towers fell and burned,
You turned a judge's ear toward our pleas.
You lingered overhead until You learned
To love the sight of humans on their knees.
If poorly I can serve, then serve I shall,
until as towers, I, too, burn and fall.
I came here with my words and You in mind,
presuming I had seven songs to write.
However, on arrival now, I find
unworthy words, deficient in Your sight.
Perhaps I could placate You if I knew
your preference in pattern, scheme, and form,
but poetry as pitiful as dust
is fair to you as worship from a worm.
A Lord and King of Kings upon Your throne,
no child of man can offer You a crown;
what can I give, that I and not You own?
Even my life by You was handed down.
To write another crown for You would be
a demonstration of futility.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Names and Things
Sometimes you hear a word, and you don't always know exactly whyyy, but you know it has to be a name.
Like Rabbit.
Scott, ever the patient one to bear the caprices of whatever idea strikes me, has allowed me to give him the nickname Rabbit.
After-the-fact, there are plentiful reasons to call him that, mostly resulting from inside jokes between us, but at the time it occurred to me to call him Rabbit, I didn't have any real reason besides that it sounded like it would fit him well.
Even ignoring the meaning of the word, it just sounded good.
I dunno'... if he be Brer Rabbit, does it make me Brer Fox? Jah, I know Brer = Brother. Forgetting that, even so.
It will be a subject for some musing on my part.
Well, that was the "Names" part of this post.
Now for the "Things" part.
There is light all over the flipping place. It occurred to me today just how ridiculously MUCH light there is. You can't live without experiencing it, feeling its influence. You can be blind, and even then light has meaning. The breath of the sun on your face as you step from behind a tall building on the fourth of May... it's tangible light. Your face tilts up and your palms flex involuntarily, flesh acting as leaves to catch that sustaining energy, that caress of countless billions of photons hammering the nuclei of your constituent atoms.
I am fascinated by the way light moves, the way shadows take on their own independence from the objects they follow, painting the sidewalk and dancing on walls.
The golden hour of pre-sunset, the wash of rich yellow-orange across even the greyest of buildings, creating a palette of ochres and umbers and siennas where before only blank spaces existed... it's glorious, and it helps me remember why architecture is so vital a thing for me.
It's experiential. It's alive. It touches the senses and gives back to the things that make it exist at all. Even the most ridiculously arse-ugly, brutalist structure has immense beauty in the golden hour. At sunrise, even the vilest of shapes casts an unrivaledly gorgeous silhouette.
Each time I step outdoors into sunlight, I feel like I'm breathing new air, and it reminds me of those things and people who are most utterly necessary for me to live. Sunlight is my direct metaphor for Scott's presence in my life.
I love light.
I need light.
I am just this curious, tiny, oddly mobile tree, searching for the perfect open place to catch the soft, gentle, loving kisses of the sun on my hands and face. The Earth holds me up, God in the rain teaches me to love warmth, the wind sings to me, and the sun waits, waits for that perfect, breathtaking moment when I'll look up and smile and just be alive while it shines....
Like Rabbit.
Scott, ever the patient one to bear the caprices of whatever idea strikes me, has allowed me to give him the nickname Rabbit.
After-the-fact, there are plentiful reasons to call him that, mostly resulting from inside jokes between us, but at the time it occurred to me to call him Rabbit, I didn't have any real reason besides that it sounded like it would fit him well.
Even ignoring the meaning of the word, it just sounded good.
I dunno'... if he be Brer Rabbit, does it make me Brer Fox? Jah, I know Brer = Brother. Forgetting that, even so.
It will be a subject for some musing on my part.
Well, that was the "Names" part of this post.
Now for the "Things" part.
There is light all over the flipping place. It occurred to me today just how ridiculously MUCH light there is. You can't live without experiencing it, feeling its influence. You can be blind, and even then light has meaning. The breath of the sun on your face as you step from behind a tall building on the fourth of May... it's tangible light. Your face tilts up and your palms flex involuntarily, flesh acting as leaves to catch that sustaining energy, that caress of countless billions of photons hammering the nuclei of your constituent atoms.
I am fascinated by the way light moves, the way shadows take on their own independence from the objects they follow, painting the sidewalk and dancing on walls.
The golden hour of pre-sunset, the wash of rich yellow-orange across even the greyest of buildings, creating a palette of ochres and umbers and siennas where before only blank spaces existed... it's glorious, and it helps me remember why architecture is so vital a thing for me.
It's experiential. It's alive. It touches the senses and gives back to the things that make it exist at all. Even the most ridiculously arse-ugly, brutalist structure has immense beauty in the golden hour. At sunrise, even the vilest of shapes casts an unrivaledly gorgeous silhouette.
Each time I step outdoors into sunlight, I feel like I'm breathing new air, and it reminds me of those things and people who are most utterly necessary for me to live. Sunlight is my direct metaphor for Scott's presence in my life.
I love light.
I need light.
I am just this curious, tiny, oddly mobile tree, searching for the perfect open place to catch the soft, gentle, loving kisses of the sun on my hands and face. The Earth holds me up, God in the rain teaches me to love warmth, the wind sings to me, and the sun waits, waits for that perfect, breathtaking moment when I'll look up and smile and just be alive while it shines....
Monday, May 3, 2010
Mindf*ck
Mel recently introduced me to a fascinating short story written by Jorge Luis Borges called The Library of Babel. The man is a genius and a dirty plagiarist all at once. I'll explain shortly.
The theory of language has always been fascinating to me, sometimes unendurably so. In that vein I dare you to read the story without coming away with at least one cosmically brain-bending thought. Mel and I were talking about it after I finished and she reminded me that we are all familiar with at least one Library of Babel—pi. Contained somewhere in pi, in plain, present-day English, (think binary or ASCII code, for example) is the story of your death. Somewhere in pi resides the secrets of flight, antibiotics, vehicular locomotion, computers, fission, and an infinitude of inventions that don't yet exist and concepts that don't exist here.
All of these secrets are also to be found there in Spanish, German, Latin, and Elvish. Don't believe me? It's mathematically provable. Pi is what happens when you put a hundred monkeys with typewriters in a room for all eternity. Sure, a lot of it will be gibberish to your understanding. The odds of a monkey randomly typing Hamlet word-for-word, the same as the original, is approximately 1 in 3.4*10^184,000. For reference, the number would take 40 pages just to display in a small-print book. But here's the thing.
There are an infinite number of possible languages, yes? In other words, there are an infinite number of ways to interpret anything given the right framing. Words, numbers; even the bird splat on the top of your car contains all the secrets of the universe! Surely your intuition must concede this to be true. Thus, everything each one of those monkeys types is literally Hamlet! The monkey typed a thousand characters? Then it could pass as a synopsis of Hamlet, depending on which language you use—how you interpret it. The monkey refuses to type at all? No worries; he is Hamlet in an unending array of ways.
How's this for cool? The first 'W' that comprises Hamlet contains the entirety of the work itself. It's only a matter of interpreting the 'W.' Molecular arrangement of the ink would surely work, as would a simple set of language-like rules based on the geometry of 'W' itself.
Thus, the story of your death is not merely to be found 'somewhere' in pi. It's not as though consecutive digits are the only way to convey it. It's not as though you have to search pi meticulously until you reach the 2,400,245,125,562,854,321,684,126,126,612,243,788,993,127th digit where your story suddenly begins. Maybe your story begins with the very first digit of pi if you skip every other digit. Maybe it is to be found by looking at every prime digit of pi. Maybe you can find a grammatically incorrect facsimile of your death story much sooner. Maybe you'd find one sooner if you switched to Spanish. Or sooner yet if you created your own language. If you thought about it longer, you'd probably arrive, as I have, at the conclusion that not only is your death story to be found somewhere in pi, but everywhere! You'd also probably arrive at the conclusion, as I have, that my death story is everyone's death story, because any meaning can be inferred from any thing.
Think on this—the story of my death is to be found in pi. I interpreted pi; my death story was the output. I can then use my death story as the object of interpretation and arrive at your death story. Then I can interpret that and arrive back at pi or any number of things. It's all cyclically and infinitely connected.
The implications of this are astonishing to me. Everything is encoded into everything. All the knowledge of existence.. every nuance that our language can't explain.. feelings broken down into symbols.. Scale seems to lose meaning. The alignment of the planets could just as well be my autobiography as the microscopic bumps on a single blade of grass. Scale itself would seem intuitively to follow a similar course—scale ultimately being relative to the point of unimportance. We could be residing in the spleen of a giant turtle, performing vital functions for it so that it doesn't die. You couldn't possibly prove me wrong, since I can just increase the size of the turtle until the identifiable aspects of a turtle aren't recognizable in the part of the universe we can see. It may be that we are in the spleen, but we can't see the intestines except outside of the observable universe. (The turtle idea was shamelessly stolen from A Wind in the Door, an excellent novel, whose author graciously took the idea from the universe and framed it for us.)
Likewise, we could be host to entire colonies of beings we really had no idea existed; entire universes too small for us to see or understand, but which are nevertheless there. Layers and layers and layers of existence and scale to the point that it all becomes rather meaningless. I kind of like thinking myself host to entire universes filled with savage little beings who endlessly war with each other and never seem to learn from it. It makes at least as much sense as each universe residing in its own little compartment, too far away from our own to matter. On second thought, I think the first idea makes a lot more sense, don't you?
---
Why did I call Mr. Borges a 'dirty plagiarist' in my opening? If you hadn't guessed by now, we are all plagiarists. Everything we can possibly create or conceive is already literally everywhere. There really is no new idea under the sun!
However, in that way that it does, the universe enjoys its little paradoxes and oddities. Just because every piece of knowledge ever is encoded into everything doesn't mean we can make sense of it. Knowledge and Understanding are two very distinct concepts, and thus it remains hard work to encode and interpret knowledge in a way we can understand. Think about it: the entire infrastructure of the internet, from English itself to the cables and computers that allow us to share words is the latently optimal manifestation of what can be found all around us. All of that enormous amount of framing is designed to convey understanding to people fortunate enough to partake of the web.
Anyway, I think my brain is both a tad overworked and thoroughly enjoying the knowledge that it knows everything, even if it doesn't know it knows. I'll let you go now. Until next time. :)
The theory of language has always been fascinating to me, sometimes unendurably so. In that vein I dare you to read the story without coming away with at least one cosmically brain-bending thought. Mel and I were talking about it after I finished and she reminded me that we are all familiar with at least one Library of Babel—pi. Contained somewhere in pi, in plain, present-day English, (think binary or ASCII code, for example) is the story of your death. Somewhere in pi resides the secrets of flight, antibiotics, vehicular locomotion, computers, fission, and an infinitude of inventions that don't yet exist and concepts that don't exist here.
All of these secrets are also to be found there in Spanish, German, Latin, and Elvish. Don't believe me? It's mathematically provable. Pi is what happens when you put a hundred monkeys with typewriters in a room for all eternity. Sure, a lot of it will be gibberish to your understanding. The odds of a monkey randomly typing Hamlet word-for-word, the same as the original, is approximately 1 in 3.4*10^184,000. For reference, the number would take 40 pages just to display in a small-print book. But here's the thing.
There are an infinite number of possible languages, yes? In other words, there are an infinite number of ways to interpret anything given the right framing. Words, numbers; even the bird splat on the top of your car contains all the secrets of the universe! Surely your intuition must concede this to be true. Thus, everything each one of those monkeys types is literally Hamlet! The monkey typed a thousand characters? Then it could pass as a synopsis of Hamlet, depending on which language you use—how you interpret it. The monkey refuses to type at all? No worries; he is Hamlet in an unending array of ways.
How's this for cool? The first 'W' that comprises Hamlet contains the entirety of the work itself. It's only a matter of interpreting the 'W.' Molecular arrangement of the ink would surely work, as would a simple set of language-like rules based on the geometry of 'W' itself.
Thus, the story of your death is not merely to be found 'somewhere' in pi. It's not as though consecutive digits are the only way to convey it. It's not as though you have to search pi meticulously until you reach the 2,400,245,125,562,854,321,684,126,126,612,243,788,993,127th digit where your story suddenly begins. Maybe your story begins with the very first digit of pi if you skip every other digit. Maybe it is to be found by looking at every prime digit of pi. Maybe you can find a grammatically incorrect facsimile of your death story much sooner. Maybe you'd find one sooner if you switched to Spanish. Or sooner yet if you created your own language. If you thought about it longer, you'd probably arrive, as I have, at the conclusion that not only is your death story to be found somewhere in pi, but everywhere! You'd also probably arrive at the conclusion, as I have, that my death story is everyone's death story, because any meaning can be inferred from any thing.
Think on this—the story of my death is to be found in pi. I interpreted pi; my death story was the output. I can then use my death story as the object of interpretation and arrive at your death story. Then I can interpret that and arrive back at pi or any number of things. It's all cyclically and infinitely connected.
The implications of this are astonishing to me. Everything is encoded into everything. All the knowledge of existence.. every nuance that our language can't explain.. feelings broken down into symbols.. Scale seems to lose meaning. The alignment of the planets could just as well be my autobiography as the microscopic bumps on a single blade of grass. Scale itself would seem intuitively to follow a similar course—scale ultimately being relative to the point of unimportance. We could be residing in the spleen of a giant turtle, performing vital functions for it so that it doesn't die. You couldn't possibly prove me wrong, since I can just increase the size of the turtle until the identifiable aspects of a turtle aren't recognizable in the part of the universe we can see. It may be that we are in the spleen, but we can't see the intestines except outside of the observable universe. (The turtle idea was shamelessly stolen from A Wind in the Door, an excellent novel, whose author graciously took the idea from the universe and framed it for us.)
Likewise, we could be host to entire colonies of beings we really had no idea existed; entire universes too small for us to see or understand, but which are nevertheless there. Layers and layers and layers of existence and scale to the point that it all becomes rather meaningless. I kind of like thinking myself host to entire universes filled with savage little beings who endlessly war with each other and never seem to learn from it. It makes at least as much sense as each universe residing in its own little compartment, too far away from our own to matter. On second thought, I think the first idea makes a lot more sense, don't you?
---
Why did I call Mr. Borges a 'dirty plagiarist' in my opening? If you hadn't guessed by now, we are all plagiarists. Everything we can possibly create or conceive is already literally everywhere. There really is no new idea under the sun!
However, in that way that it does, the universe enjoys its little paradoxes and oddities. Just because every piece of knowledge ever is encoded into everything doesn't mean we can make sense of it. Knowledge and Understanding are two very distinct concepts, and thus it remains hard work to encode and interpret knowledge in a way we can understand. Think about it: the entire infrastructure of the internet, from English itself to the cables and computers that allow us to share words is the latently optimal manifestation of what can be found all around us. All of that enormous amount of framing is designed to convey understanding to people fortunate enough to partake of the web.
Anyway, I think my brain is both a tad overworked and thoroughly enjoying the knowledge that it knows everything, even if it doesn't know it knows. I'll let you go now. Until next time. :)
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Watch my brain maim itself
Hey all. I suppose I should introduce myself.
But I'd make it boring. So I won't. (Mel so skillfully entertained us with an introduction anyway, so..)
Instead, I'll talk about counterfeiting money. Why? Well, I've no interest in counterfeit money except as tool for exploration. There's a million questions we can ask about the ill-gotten currency. Is it ethical? Do we loathe people who engage in it? Does it destabilize society? Do we care that these counterfeiters degrade our purchasing power? And what about the counterfeiters themselves? Who are they? Why do they do it? Are they trying to make a political statement? Are they just hard up for cash? Regarding justice for these people, does it even matter why they did it or does it only matter that they did?
Typical answers to the ethics will range from we-must-agree-to-abide-by-the-law-in-a-civilized-society to I-work-hard-for-my-money! What-makes-them-so-averse-to-work? These are both valid perspectives but not the only ones by a long shot. The way I see it, a typical person trades his time for money. A counterfeiter risks his freedom for it. Sounds like a fair deal to me. There's a certain romantic flair to venturing intensely at the risk of devastating consequences.
---
Today I've been thinking about why I get the urge to head for the nearest cave and stick my head in a hole when people get enthusiastic about business and entrepreneurship. And about why I would thrive in a world without corporations, logos, slogans, the stock market, and banks. I traced a few points of logic until I arrived at a more base reaction: people who seek power are automatically unfit to wield it. Don't get me wrong—in reality, to the victor go the spoils. They require no justification. However, something in me would love to see a Plato-style hierarchy designed to keep the power-hungry from attaining power, much like finance is designed to keep the poor from accumulating money.
The problem, of course, is that those who seek something usually get it. What we need is a brilliant madman—a lunatic, really—who despite his lack of affinity for playing the game, is damn good at it. Good enough to outmaneuver his opposition. And when he attains absolute power he'd use it to ensure that people like me run corporations and not droves of sycophants droning on about collateralized debt obligations and other abstractions as though they weren't codewords for thievery.
Sure, the system would probably collapse. Am I callous for entertaining the idea? Nothing real or helpful would dissolve—only the secret abstractions that fuel unfair advantages for the minority.
Is it fair of me to think such things, even if I wouldn't truly adopt the necessary values? Does fairness matter? Why regard fairness in the highest esteem when making decisions? Why not regard kindness, or strength, or adherence to a certain moral code, or entropy as the primary driving force behind decisions? At any rate, I can guarantee you that for every 'just' decision you make, there are a dozen bleeding hearts right behind you ready to make a 'merciful' decision and undo your work. For every man using the notion of order to drive his decision-making, there's a dozen right behind him with a mantra of chaos to unweave what he wove.
Does it sound like I have a chip on my shoulder regarding the socioeconomic climate? Well..
I may be good at justifying actions, but I'm great at justifying inaction. It is my blessing and my curse. Does the money game suck? That's okay—I adjust my attitude to largely forget it exists so my loathing for it doesn't consume me. Any external problem can be met with an equal amount of internal fortitude.
Not only do we require no justification for our actions, but we can thoroughly justify them with a simple shift in perspective. I could easily paint counterfeiting in the noblest of lights—not hard to do when your competition is the Federal Reserve, after all—to the point that you wouldn't be able to tell which way is north any longer. I could lead you into a maze of moral ambiguity so twisting you might lose yourself. If you continue reading, that just may be what I do. Proceed with caution. Censor me from your kiddies so that they may have the chance to lead wholesome, moral lives.
The longer I live the hazier my vision gets—I see neither black nor white. Nonetheless, I envy people who do—in me is a certain admiration reserved for those who adopt values and live as though their lives depend on them. To be fully vested in your beliefs; to live boldly as though the values make the man—quaint? Idyllic? Simple? Maybe it's just nostalgia. I've seen too much to believe the values make the man or that integrity ought to be lauded, by which I mean—if you try to remove every bit of hypocrisy from your life, you'll succeed only when you no longer are making decisions. Every action taken is perfectly hypocritical. Again, this only takes a simple shift in perspective to see.
Learn to live with your hypocrisy in an inherently hypocritical existence. I'm not sure when hypocrisy got the stigma it has, but I challenge you to see if you can shift your perspective enough to see it as an asset or in a positive light. I find it becomes much easier the more you do it, and leads to all sorts of interesting observations you can use to shock people who think you believe what you're conjecturing.
Contrast as the basest form of meaning
The yin-yang. Balance. The middle way. If you think you understand contrast, then you probably haven't thought about it enough. It has an infinitude of nuances. For instance—a perpetually balanced state is actually a state of imbalance because it is static and thus has no contrast. Imbalance itself is necessary for balance. Sometimes the bad guys have to win so completely that the rest of us would be in danger of losing hope that it could ever be any different. Otherwise, we could have no conception of what it is like when the good guys are in control and life is great.
This is why the concept of Eutopia will probably remain a dream; either the people living in it will not appreciate what they have, or what we in our imperfect world would consider trivial problems would inflate to fill their entire vision. They would give running out of toilet paper the same weight as we might give to inadvertently injuring someone with an automobile. (I guess their utopia managed to eliminate automobile collisions but not TP shortages. Don't ask me.)
Existence itself could hold little meaning unless there were some counterpart to it—oblivion. You can't have light without dark or pleasure without pain. To experience a degree of pain is what defines one's capacity for pleasure.
In this way, existence paradoxically builds a sort of internal balance within us to oppose what could be a vast external imbalance in the environment. Existence loves paradoxes. You could say that the paradox is rather a basic building block of the universe.
---
In spite of all this detachment, though, I do feel as though I've a role to play. I can tell you I don't feel like I belong here. Oh, sure—there are fleeting sanctuaries here and there. Places where things don't move so quickly, and where I can belong to a community absent coercive and individuating forces designed to sustain mindless productivism. So what am I saying? I suppose I'm saying that despite all the moral nihilism, I have an underlying nature that wishes to act in specific ways. I still have free will of course, but it seems guided by a predisposition of some sort, a beautiful tapestry of idealism implanted in its core. It seems to balk at the apparent meaninglessness of it all and decides to assign meaning. My head is telling me that my decisions don't matter, but my heart begs to differ. Another paradox. Oh boy.
Despite my apparent unfitness for this world, I'm extremely fortunate to have been given one sanctuary great enough to call home: my lover Mel. Our philosophies don't always agree, but we are both wise enough to realize that it doesn't matter. We both understand how each others' preferences can be justified—she prefers a more forceful and elegant approach: the idea that means are justified by ends. I come from a gentler perspective—I'd risk an unfulfilled end for the sake of gentle means.
I don't know about her, but her approach endlessly fascinates me. It's no better or worse than my own, but delightfully different. I'm drawn to it and her in an inexplicable way. I'm sure you will be as well.
Before I sign off for the day, I'll say just one more thing. If you find any of this disagreeable, that's okay. It's likely that everything I've said is wrong in at least as many ways as it's right. You could think of my writing as a mechanism whereby I define the chunk of the universe that is me rather than an attempt to be empirically accurate.
But I'd make it boring. So I won't. (Mel so skillfully entertained us with an introduction anyway, so..)
Instead, I'll talk about counterfeiting money. Why? Well, I've no interest in counterfeit money except as tool for exploration. There's a million questions we can ask about the ill-gotten currency. Is it ethical? Do we loathe people who engage in it? Does it destabilize society? Do we care that these counterfeiters degrade our purchasing power? And what about the counterfeiters themselves? Who are they? Why do they do it? Are they trying to make a political statement? Are they just hard up for cash? Regarding justice for these people, does it even matter why they did it or does it only matter that they did?
Typical answers to the ethics will range from we-must-agree-to-abide-by-the-law-in-a-civilized-society to I-work-hard-for-my-money! What-makes-them-so-averse-to-work? These are both valid perspectives but not the only ones by a long shot. The way I see it, a typical person trades his time for money. A counterfeiter risks his freedom for it. Sounds like a fair deal to me. There's a certain romantic flair to venturing intensely at the risk of devastating consequences.
---
Today I've been thinking about why I get the urge to head for the nearest cave and stick my head in a hole when people get enthusiastic about business and entrepreneurship. And about why I would thrive in a world without corporations, logos, slogans, the stock market, and banks. I traced a few points of logic until I arrived at a more base reaction: people who seek power are automatically unfit to wield it. Don't get me wrong—in reality, to the victor go the spoils. They require no justification. However, something in me would love to see a Plato-style hierarchy designed to keep the power-hungry from attaining power, much like finance is designed to keep the poor from accumulating money.
The problem, of course, is that those who seek something usually get it. What we need is a brilliant madman—a lunatic, really—who despite his lack of affinity for playing the game, is damn good at it. Good enough to outmaneuver his opposition. And when he attains absolute power he'd use it to ensure that people like me run corporations and not droves of sycophants droning on about collateralized debt obligations and other abstractions as though they weren't codewords for thievery.
Sure, the system would probably collapse. Am I callous for entertaining the idea? Nothing real or helpful would dissolve—only the secret abstractions that fuel unfair advantages for the minority.
Is it fair of me to think such things, even if I wouldn't truly adopt the necessary values? Does fairness matter? Why regard fairness in the highest esteem when making decisions? Why not regard kindness, or strength, or adherence to a certain moral code, or entropy as the primary driving force behind decisions? At any rate, I can guarantee you that for every 'just' decision you make, there are a dozen bleeding hearts right behind you ready to make a 'merciful' decision and undo your work. For every man using the notion of order to drive his decision-making, there's a dozen right behind him with a mantra of chaos to unweave what he wove.
Does it sound like I have a chip on my shoulder regarding the socioeconomic climate? Well..
I may be good at justifying actions, but I'm great at justifying inaction. It is my blessing and my curse. Does the money game suck? That's okay—I adjust my attitude to largely forget it exists so my loathing for it doesn't consume me. Any external problem can be met with an equal amount of internal fortitude.
Not only do we require no justification for our actions, but we can thoroughly justify them with a simple shift in perspective. I could easily paint counterfeiting in the noblest of lights—not hard to do when your competition is the Federal Reserve, after all—to the point that you wouldn't be able to tell which way is north any longer. I could lead you into a maze of moral ambiguity so twisting you might lose yourself. If you continue reading, that just may be what I do. Proceed with caution. Censor me from your kiddies so that they may have the chance to lead wholesome, moral lives.
The longer I live the hazier my vision gets—I see neither black nor white. Nonetheless, I envy people who do—in me is a certain admiration reserved for those who adopt values and live as though their lives depend on them. To be fully vested in your beliefs; to live boldly as though the values make the man—quaint? Idyllic? Simple? Maybe it's just nostalgia. I've seen too much to believe the values make the man or that integrity ought to be lauded, by which I mean—if you try to remove every bit of hypocrisy from your life, you'll succeed only when you no longer are making decisions. Every action taken is perfectly hypocritical. Again, this only takes a simple shift in perspective to see.
Learn to live with your hypocrisy in an inherently hypocritical existence. I'm not sure when hypocrisy got the stigma it has, but I challenge you to see if you can shift your perspective enough to see it as an asset or in a positive light. I find it becomes much easier the more you do it, and leads to all sorts of interesting observations you can use to shock people who think you believe what you're conjecturing.
Contrast as the basest form of meaning
The yin-yang. Balance. The middle way. If you think you understand contrast, then you probably haven't thought about it enough. It has an infinitude of nuances. For instance—a perpetually balanced state is actually a state of imbalance because it is static and thus has no contrast. Imbalance itself is necessary for balance. Sometimes the bad guys have to win so completely that the rest of us would be in danger of losing hope that it could ever be any different. Otherwise, we could have no conception of what it is like when the good guys are in control and life is great.
This is why the concept of Eutopia will probably remain a dream; either the people living in it will not appreciate what they have, or what we in our imperfect world would consider trivial problems would inflate to fill their entire vision. They would give running out of toilet paper the same weight as we might give to inadvertently injuring someone with an automobile. (I guess their utopia managed to eliminate automobile collisions but not TP shortages. Don't ask me.)
Existence itself could hold little meaning unless there were some counterpart to it—oblivion. You can't have light without dark or pleasure without pain. To experience a degree of pain is what defines one's capacity for pleasure.
In this way, existence paradoxically builds a sort of internal balance within us to oppose what could be a vast external imbalance in the environment. Existence loves paradoxes. You could say that the paradox is rather a basic building block of the universe.
---
In spite of all this detachment, though, I do feel as though I've a role to play. I can tell you I don't feel like I belong here. Oh, sure—there are fleeting sanctuaries here and there. Places where things don't move so quickly, and where I can belong to a community absent coercive and individuating forces designed to sustain mindless productivism. So what am I saying? I suppose I'm saying that despite all the moral nihilism, I have an underlying nature that wishes to act in specific ways. I still have free will of course, but it seems guided by a predisposition of some sort, a beautiful tapestry of idealism implanted in its core. It seems to balk at the apparent meaninglessness of it all and decides to assign meaning. My head is telling me that my decisions don't matter, but my heart begs to differ. Another paradox. Oh boy.
Despite my apparent unfitness for this world, I'm extremely fortunate to have been given one sanctuary great enough to call home: my lover Mel. Our philosophies don't always agree, but we are both wise enough to realize that it doesn't matter. We both understand how each others' preferences can be justified—she prefers a more forceful and elegant approach: the idea that means are justified by ends. I come from a gentler perspective—I'd risk an unfulfilled end for the sake of gentle means.
I don't know about her, but her approach endlessly fascinates me. It's no better or worse than my own, but delightfully different. I'm drawn to it and her in an inexplicable way. I'm sure you will be as well.
Before I sign off for the day, I'll say just one more thing. If you find any of this disagreeable, that's okay. It's likely that everything I've said is wrong in at least as many ways as it's right. You could think of my writing as a mechanism whereby I define the chunk of the universe that is me rather than an attempt to be empirically accurate.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Hidely ho, neighbourinos!
Welcome to our blog; I suppose I should start by introducing myself and my Idahoan.
you can call us Melissa and Scott, I suppose. No, those are not our first names, but this is the internet, after all. :)
We've been together about seven-ish months, now, and we've decided that joint blogging sounds like fun. We both have odd little philosophies regarding life, the universe, and 42-I mean... ;)
We talk too much and not enough, given the opportunity for either, and this is the perfect outlet for it.
Here's the skinny on us:
Me: Mel.
Short.
Pianist.
Studying architecture, which may or may not be a very crazy-making move on my part.
Illinoisian.
INFJ, of the rabidly doofy variety.
Animorphs fan, bibliophile in general.
Experientialist. Have fun googling that one; the wiki article on it is one sentence long. ;)
Him: Scott.
Not-short.
Violist.
Studying me, apparently... which is incredibly sweet in a totally-not-stalkerish way. *I jest.*
Idahoan in southern Illinois.
INFP, of the adorable-but-taciturn variety. He talks more through the keyboard than aloud, but that's no problem, considering I talk more than pretty much anybody.... >_<
If he wants you to know him better, he can type it himself. [She says to the Idahoan sitting next to her...]
Huh. I do abuse ellipses most severely. O_O;
And emoticons.
Ouch.
YAY, sentence fragments! I looove how frangible the English language is!
-Mel
you can call us Melissa and Scott, I suppose. No, those are not our first names, but this is the internet, after all. :)
We've been together about seven-ish months, now, and we've decided that joint blogging sounds like fun. We both have odd little philosophies regarding life, the universe, and 42-I mean... ;)
We talk too much and not enough, given the opportunity for either, and this is the perfect outlet for it.
Here's the skinny on us:
Me: Mel.
Short.
Pianist.
Studying architecture, which may or may not be a very crazy-making move on my part.
Illinoisian.
INFJ, of the rabidly doofy variety.
Animorphs fan, bibliophile in general.
Experientialist. Have fun googling that one; the wiki article on it is one sentence long. ;)
Him: Scott.
Not-short.
Violist.
Studying me, apparently... which is incredibly sweet in a totally-not-stalkerish way. *I jest.*
Idahoan in southern Illinois.
INFP, of the adorable-but-taciturn variety. He talks more through the keyboard than aloud, but that's no problem, considering I talk more than pretty much anybody.... >_<
If he wants you to know him better, he can type it himself. [She says to the Idahoan sitting next to her...]
Huh. I do abuse ellipses most severely. O_O;
And emoticons.
Ouch.
YAY, sentence fragments! I looove how frangible the English language is!
-Mel
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