I want to paint a despotic picture. I
want to do it through the lens of my meager and small perspective. I
hope if you care to tag along on this journey, you’ll get the same
things I’m after in writing it.
I’ve been everywhere, or at least,
that's what it feels like. I remember what it feels like to have a
small, but strong enough conception of family. I remember what it’s
been like to be insecure and scared. I’ve never felt so alone than
when I thought I was in a kind of love that no one could understand.
I have punctuated and deliberate memories of times when I “woke up”
to who I was when things needed to change. I reached a point
where I could not bear the anxiety and stress of holding a bad idea.
I didn’t need to keep relearning the consequences of my behavior. I
didn’t have to deny my feelings or thoughts.
You can read through old blogs where
I’ve been an emotional train wreck. You can read depressing and
dramatic professions of confusion and doubt. You can probably hear
the inflection I give the word “fuck” in some of my most pissed
off rants about religion, relationships, or general tom-fuckery from
various people I’ve occasioned to know. I feel it necessary to
bring this up when it comes to my digressions about people and their
motivations. I don’t exactly seek to wear street cred on my sleeve.
I operate under the assumption that we’re all human. What good is
my advice or meddling disposition if not to see results! Why get a
little cocky about getting laughs or part-timing as a therapist if
there isn’t something to be said about my potential insight?
The thing that I’d love to be too
arrogant about were I not so humble, my personality, my perspective,
my genuine understanding of something you may not be as keen to as
me, is what I look for in other people. There’s the default
personality you get by being born under your circumstances and your
history. Then there’s what you get to shape when you start making
decisions. I think the problems that will extinguish us as a species
lie between those two different “Yous.”
I have a relatively psychotic mother. I
can take my childhood and know all of the enraging, depressing,
demoralizing, and humiliating places it can send me. I can feel them
right now just trying to pass on by. That’s the history me. The one
who’s, calmly, writing through the heartbeats is the decision me.
There are feelings, staples of our beings, which we may never shake.
Whether there are physical reactions, winding thought patterns, or
little ticks that, for all intents and purposes, dictate us at that
precise moment. How we conceptualize them, how we break them down, or
where we put them in our chosen mental framework, I think, will
dictate our very survival.
It’s easy to feel. It’s too easy
to feel. For the better part of our existence, it’s our feelings
that meant life or death. Run or fight. Are you afraid, ferocious, or
both and the adrenaline rush doesn’t care to split hairs. I very
really hate when people take the easy way out. Stated differently, I
hate when people don’t think. For surely, thinking is taken for
granted. You can’t even get up in the morning without thinking
about how to get out bed. Obviously, if it feels good or the people
around you agree with it, how fine a comb do you expect needs to be
run through it?
The one and only thing that makes me
“cool” or “informed” or “Nick P.” is the exercise of my
brain. Only when I sat and thought a fuck ton about what it meant to
love or be in love did I find myself upon a defensible position on
the matter. Only after I assessed the likely consequences of my
future with certain people in my life did I start to form strong
opinions on ideas about family or what it means to be in a
relationship. After 283 and counting blogs of self-exploration can I
even regard what have truly been traumatic and compelling moments
with oft fondness and purpose to inform and hopefully better the life
of someone who’s been there as well.
And that speaks to the consequences of
the thinking individual. It’s not to preach, but to educate. It’s
not to self-deprecate, but to conceptualize. It’s a move towards
freedom of expression and a celebration of choice. It’s exalting
knowledge and respecting its ability to, if not erase, draw such an
immense picture around the pain and confusion, it becomes a mere
compliment to the artist’s overall motif.
This is how I judge character. This is
where I play with my internal scale regarding my level of interaction
with some person, idea, or endeavor. This is how I choose my heroes
and what I “waste my time” with. And like recognizes like. And
when you’re not a certain way, it’s jarring; it sticks in my head
and troubles me in ways that take it well beyond my probably already
spent conception of you. Now it’s at the idea level. Now it’s
about the implications. The “what if society at large” questions
arise. The uniquely human psychological dispositions and interplay of
personalities is a never ending snowball.
It’s how I learned to make a
distinction between you and your so-called ideas. It’s why I
softened up arguing so vehemently about religious topics. It’s why
I try not to automatically stigmatize something and ask a million
questions. I feel like this isn’t particularly new behavior, but I
haven’t stated it like this. And I’d totally understand why
someone would think me hard-lined as for or against. To say that I’m
anti-religion or spirituality or whatever else is to simply get me
wrong. I’m against unhelpful or incorrect ideas.
But what arrogance! How can you have an
incorrect idea? When it doesn't take you where you were trying to go.
If you make a claim about yourself and nothing about your actions or
feelings reflect that, your idea is incorrect. If you're not prepared
to recognize how easy and often the incompleteness of your knowledge
on a situation can corrupt your ideas about it, you're not doing
yourself any favors.
What we see and do pragmatically is
ultimately dictated by the philosophical underpinnings that either
enable or inhibit potential courses of action. If the decision makers
believe that pursuing carbon emitting fuels is better than
sustainable energy, the likelihood of an extinction event rises past
a point people concerned with living should be comfortable with. It
doesn’t matter how much you may recant your actions faced with the
reality of your decision, it’s no longer really an option for this
particular group of 7 billion people to carry on into the next few
hundred years.
It’s not my concern that there aren’t
enough smart people out there or enough personalities. I don’t
think everything is fucked up. I think there are different
layers to the game. It’s a numbers game, it’s a group psychology
game, and it’s an information gathering and translating game. But
mostly, it’s a game people are playing incorrectly, and it’s hard
to really measure how much blame lies with them and how much is the
field that’s been narrowed before they got there.
What’s most disturbing to me, and
hopefully it’s just a symptom of my small perspective, is what I
find the solution to be: thinking. Taking lessons to heart, adopting
and trying ideas, and forcing yourself to an actual platform or
informed opinion. I find this disturbing because I know how subtle
and nuanced our behavior and thoughts can be. I know we can say one
thing, do another, and be on a completely different planet mentally
that justifies all of it. I can say that my friends are better
at not being like this than most, but they’re not immune. Certainly
I could be under a spell about my future or capabilities given my
ignorance of the state of the world at large.
But is this not how we learn? Hold an
idea, fight for it, and see it through until the consequences? Was it
not necessary for me to have and hold a host of terrible ideas in my
past in order to garner the kind of perspective and habit of
reflection I hold today? How do you fix a necessary precondition to
enlightenment? How can you account for the infinite veins through
which someone may learn a lesson? Surely an ignorance of the future,
or even the here and now should not arrest our decisions or make us
any less beholden to our ideas! At least, this is what I hear, time
and again, and all I have is an emphatic well, maybe it should!
You see, we have a metric for judging
ideas that takes us out of the ignorant monkey brains we’re stuck
with. That metric is science. To talk of all the things science
doesn’t know is for you to insult yourself, and the collective
conscious that was overwhelmingly aimed towards making your life a
little bit better, at least sometimes. There isn’t a single
vaccinated person with an i-anything that has a right to speak
against the advancement of information and technology or the impact
it’s had on their lives. But then, why do we make it a controversy?
It only makes sense to me when you
bring it back to the very real and much ignored human failings of
thought. If we’re bored and want controversy, just pick a topic. If
we’re confused or afraid of a subject, there’s a chemical fix in
merely reacting. When you feel allegiance to a group, then what a
great feeling to know your decisions can be made for you. We have
personal, compelling, life-altering lessons that need to be
translated en masse. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve sang and
written about love, you don’t know MY KIND of love! My family, my
experience, my small mind is more compelling, more understanding, and
more accepting of what YOU and YOUR BIG world would call my failings,
and that makes you wrong!
Just think of the children. I feel like
any parent can relate to being in this situation and probably any
teacher too. You don’t need a special kind of arrogance or sense of
privilege to know when you can be an authority on something. Reduce
our politics to overgrown children, and what happens? The people who
cry, fold their arms, lie, and name call, with no one to keep them in
check, win. We’re whiney children with no parents. And when we
adopt a parent, let’s call it “God” for shits and giggles, no
way, it tends to think like us! It believes in us, it will save us,
we just have to provide no more reason to believe in it than because
we wanna! We can get even more ridiculous and project onto a faceless
entity called The State or Big Government while living in a
democracy!
We crave being justified. It doesn’t
matter if we’ve picked a reasonable topic to feel validated over.
The very fact that we’ve found someone to agree is enough. The very
fact of our compelling feelings is sufficient to keep the motor
running. Being skeptical and checking your ideas are conscious and
deliberate acts. You aren’t born with the knowledge that you
can be profoundly and perpetually wrong. What that means for how you
behave in the world I think can overwhelm every best and informed
intention. It’s the habit, the norm, the default position and
therefor the most likely and easiest.
What we prescribe for ourselves we
paradoxically won’t advocate for our neighbor while they take our
examples and react in kind. Human rights don’t extend past the
front door. We can kill, but when killed it’s the most atrocious.
We can steal but when stolen from it’s a threat to democracy and
the free market! Today we have policies from 1984. Today we
are causing irreversible damage to the planet. Today our numbers
paint a grim picture for us and our offspring. Today we are arguing
about demonstrable facts against magic. You aren’t separate or
better than the discourse. It will come back around and affect you.
Our normal
doesn’t work. Our normal is to fight. Our normal mishears,
misreads, and distrusts. Our normal is fairly lazy. Our normal is
about convenience and speed. We’re complicit and complacent in our
circumstances. Our normal is to get used to it. We make excuses, we
adopt distractions and vices. We project. Our normal is to ultimately
reject everything about our normality ironically for “something
more” we disable ourselves from ever creating. We want love, but
refuse to understand or define it. We want God without holding a
Godly standard. We avoid the struggle and pain because we refuse to
think to a point where it finally pays out. We refuse to sacrifice
even a sliver of ourselves if it means too much disappointment or
another failure. Only to perpetually fail to think.
Practice makes permanent.
