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.

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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.

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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.