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.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
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.
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