Honesty is a funny thing. It changes the nature of what you’re trying to be honest about. It’s going to change this blog as I figure out what the hell is on my mind.
I write for me, for clarity, and to maybe in small, ever so small ways, influence someone who reads me. I talk about religion, personal squabbles, from time to time political crap. I used to just endlessly complain about things until I no longer had a headache. Granted, that may still happen, but it’s not the norm anymore. I have a problem where I never feel like enough has been said. I take things that people want to remember as “a fight” or “a platitude” and go on for days about the implications. My attempts, I suppose, to relate to this simple method of understanding is the random rhyme times or poetry. I’ll sort that under ironic.
I hate and love patterns. I love their utility. I hate when I see someone stuck in them. I hate to think of myself as simply being part of a huge one. Perhaps to some it’s some token of relief, “oh hey, it’s all planned out for me I can sit back and ride it out.” I have this searing desire to blame people for their actions and find pride in objectively accounting for how and why I behave. I’d like for there to be an inherent respect for using this chance to think about things to actually matter even a marginal degree more than those who say “fuck it” and scurry about haphazardly.
Logic is cold. When things behave in calculable ways, they just do. It doesn’t matter how you feel about math, things are going to play out according to the numbers, at least for this universe.
I don’t believe in free will while acting like I do.
As a result, I judge, while having very little faith in my judgments past a meager point. It keeps me perpetually confused, yet not necessarily frustrated. The problem is I want free will. I understand the implications of believing in free will. It would tie up a lot of loose ends about the battles I’ve engaged in or the decisions I’ve made. I just can’t convince myself it is real. If anything, I do things to perpetuate an illusion.
The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.
I thusly restrain myself to capacity. Let me explain. Because I can feel pain, I work on creating an illusion that keeps it minimal. Because I hate certain patterns, I mold my illusion to surprise me. I engage in this for the deliberate randomness. In this sense, I engineer keeping myself happy and sane. If there is a ridiculously high limit to what I can create or control, I try to find it. I keep going until I get bored or find “good reason” to stop.
A significant issue with this is when I involve other people.
I’m a loner primarily for the utility of trying to refrain from being deliberately evil. This is fundamentally why I seek out people who don’t just like me or get along well enough, but genuinely understand how and why and where I’m coming from. I can’t hurt people who know what I’m doing. And no, it’s not enough to act like you know, or assure me that you know, like recognizes like. When a psych experimenter goes into the doctor’s office pretending to have schizophrenic episodes, there’s a reason he fools the doctor but not the real schizophrenic sitting in the hall.
I admit I’m a social primate. I like hanging out and drinking, talking, fucking, gaming, Frisbee, and the occasional pissing contest. The conflict is whether these are the goals or the distractions. I think they’re both. Then you go a level higher, justifying the means, or lack thereof, for the ends. How much money do you think I need to make to drink, talk, fuck, play games, and continue on my quest to watch all the media on my hard drives? I’ll tip my hat to my relative ingenuity and perspective to say, not that much. But I hate hippies. I know that I would feel lazy and that I’ve wasted my potential. I mean, even having the idea of potential is part of my acting like I have free will. As long as my ideas about potential stay…stable…there’s still hope right?
You’ll learn it’s not your job to save the world. Excerpt from here. (now broken)
But it’s my world. And my world is worth saving. Once I learn this nugget, I’ve grown complacent, resolved to my fate. My world involves all sorts of people from those marginally helpful to the ones who are utterly destructive. I have very explicit goals and ideas about how these peoples’ behaviors influence my world. As a result, I need to change them or myself accordingly.
I know I can change people, but act like I can’t.
I want to be an arbiter of fate, not dictator. That would just fall victim to the pattern problem. It’s hard to look at social psychology, history, or mirror neurons and make the case against the potential for influencing people. We think because we can scream “you don’t know me!” and it actually convinces people, that we’re somehow insulated from everything before and around us.
This is me veering off topic. Any master plan I had to take over the world would have to make a priority out of nuance. There’s no way to account for every interpretation, but theoretically you could build in mechanisms to address the fallout. At the very least, try to protect yourself. This is me veering back
I like people, for a while. Thus I hate them, for they are the source of all my “misery.” My capacity for hatred should not be understated. Now, on the surface, even I want to call this projecting. This isn’t a bad thing. If I have very specific things that I hate, of course it’s because I recognize my own capacity for them as well. But, more of course, it’s because of the destructive nature of certain position. It’s not your pride or laziness or fear in and of themselves that I hate. It’s when you don’t yet, or moreover care, to learn when and why they’re bad things.
Maybe because I don’t see my potential for ever “getting over” being deliberately evil, I get frustrated when I see other people refusing to change. This compounded with my lack of belief in free will, creates a perfect storm of timidly pointing the finger, essentially back at myself, relying on a naïve hope about potential that can break the cycle. Yet, I never feel like a slave. I don’t go out of my way to cause harm; I just know I’m prepared to. I reach a point of “overtly compelling feelings” and simply make a decision. Or, at least, feel like the decision is mine.
So then the idea is to convince people they have a decision, even if it “should” only be in the service of goals on one end of a spectrum. Self-interest only works when people feel like they’re going to die and don’t actually want to. Social welfare only works when you even understand how much you’re getting from “the system.” Get your government hands off my Medicaid. I think this is why I opt for a “tough love” position; essentially forcing people to act in their best interests, the ensuing drama of not doing so not being worth it.
I’m left with just working with whatever is on my mind. I’m not trying to lie, but I feel I’m going to inevitably make myself look like a liar. I can state a goal or something about my character and still hold tight to the idea that the only truth is change; the rate and nature of which to be determined. Fate is more than just convincing yourself of an idea; it’s the moment to moment commitment to that idea. Maybe you’re only free when you realize your commitment to each moment.
