I want to be right! It’s the only
thing I want besides all those other things. I want to know when I
say something it carries weight. I want to see the consequences of my
actions. I want to have a grasp on the situation that sees 10 ways
out when all you’re looking at is the gun. It’s insatiable. I’ll
never be right about enough things. When I get something right it’s
like a drug. It’s the power of understanding. It can surprise you!
I love the idea of potentially being right about things I can’t
even be consciously aware of yet. Right is right. Wrong is wrong.
There is a right way to convey
information. When you pick an end, you can tailor the metric by which
that information is heard. Peoples’ perception of your tailoring
will claim you are wrong. They aren’t aware there is a right way to
listen. Maybe your joke didn’t land; that doesn’t mean you don’t
know how to tell a joke. If the joker cares more about the laugh than
the message, he can learn your language. If you don’t need to laugh
in order to grasp what he’s saying, now you’re getting somewhere.
We’re forced to deal with
consequences. It becomes harder and harder to claim it was a joke
when you’re addressing a crowd whose language you ought to
understand. That is, any reasonable person doesn’t stand up to give
a commencement speech at a black college and toss around the word
nigger genuinely expecting people to give him a chance and just
listen a little closer to the innate hilarity. He’s downright
desperately wrong in his acceptance of the consequences of words
under specific circumstances.
It’s in the consequences, the science
of cause and effect if you will, that I want to be right. Socially, I
want to be generally right, pragmatically I want to be calculably
right, and personally, I want to be infallible. Clearly, we should
define what that infallibility would look like. I base my life on
rules that were hard-fought and hopefully overtly rational. For one
of them to change, it should be quite the argumentative spectacle.
For example, who’s lining up to
persuade me otherwise that people should be healthy? Of course,
someone will play the small mind and say something to the effect that
“healthy doesn’t quite mean healthy.” And we’ll
merrily skip away from the point. Someone will say “look over here
at my mentally-challenged brother, which my family loves
unconditionally!” Seemingly unaware of the slighted mockery they’ve
just made of the situation. No doubt we’ll hear from way left field
something to the effect of “if people don’t get sick, how are
they supposed to die?”
Along with my premise of peoples’
health being a “should,” an “ought,” and a “go fuck
yourself if you could possibly think otherwise” there are natural
tie-ins related to what that idea rightly means. It means we should
not have poisonous food, or poisonous water, or poisonous air. It
means that there are consequences that overwhelmingly people don’t
like when they get sick. It acknowledges the reality, ubiquity, and
severity of sickness unchecked. It’s as obvious as it is accessible
and relatable. That is, if you accept the right definition of
healthy.
I think, the blanket statement “people
should be healthy” is a right one. “We’ll eliminate suffering
due to illness” is a wrong statement. I point this out because
people begin to expect outlandish and over-reaching things. To
advocate health is not to cultivate a God-complex. But that’s what
people will think you are doing, and then it will become about
everything besides health.
So try. Shake me from my premise with a
brilliant argument and I might change my mind, just be careful the
moment I do I’m not dropping the vials of Ebola I’ve been
juggling. If you, as a reasonable person maintained on my friend
list, were persuaded after the first line and think this is carrying
on far too long. I AGREE! But this cumbersome joke of a conversation
we get dragged into by long-winded bloggers with more opinions than
hairs on their head is why nothing changes. There are, in fact,
lawyers that argue health doesn’t quite mean health. There have
been people, at a microphone in public, who’ve asked if we perfect
technology and can keep people alive, how they’ll ever be expected
to die.
It’s hard to be right about
something. It’s respectable because it takes work that you can’t
fake. People don’t contemplate a bullshitter, they suffer through
what’s been forced into their heads. If you’re the victim of a
“brilliant” ad campaign and have genuinely longed for some piece
of something and it made you sad not to get it, you’ve suffered a
bullshitter. If you’ve “never found the right person” because
no one can live up to what it takes to understand you or make you
feel like a princess, you’ve suffered a bullshitter. You’re no
more a man because you drive a big American truck than you are
because you shave with 5 razors instead of 1. I hope to be
contemplated, not suffered.
There is a right
way to think about being right and wrong. Black and white doesn’t
exist, but blacker and whiter become clearer the more specific you
get. An individual pixel doesn’t tell you this word is white.
Yes, we live in a complex ecosystem
with trillions upon trillions of externalities no matter what corner
of the existence you want to look. All of it has a history. All of it
lives or dies by ideas. It is right to accept the consequences of
history and ideas.
One time a guy thought we should get
rid of all the Jews (and a few others). This is a patently ridiculous
idea that actually made The Holocaust and has been mirrored towards
different sects around the world through to modern times. Why? We try
to understand it in daft terms like “one day one guy wanted to kill
Jews.”
It’s right to analyze political
structure, and human psychology, and economies, and incentives, and
fear, and opportunism, and every little thing that contributes to a
big picture. You have to remember those things don’t go away. An
argument from a textbook or quote from “touted smart fuck Ph.D.”
does not negate the many windows you can open to let in common sense.
I get tired of feeling like a forlorn
fan-girl when I hear people speak, rather eloquently, about shit
that’s just obvious. I don’t need a doctor to tell me we should
save seeds or a Harvard professor to explain all the bad things that
can happen when you don’t hold people accountable. There is no
legal argument to be made that makes me believe my vote should amount
to how much money I make or that I’m still in a representative
democracy.
It’s like we can’t just be “human”
anymore when all I know how to do is rightly discern the implications
of acting like one. You can’t just live. You can’t just eat and
drink. You can’t trust that people will do what’s best, because
what’s best has nothing to do with humanity and everything to do
with indulgence and predation. We’re too big. It’s not just the
litany of ideas but the overwhelming inability to understand what
they’re doing to the world around you. It is right to think there
are many things wrong with our circumstances. People have done, are
willing, and are currently doing you wrong and I don’t even know
exactly what it’ll take to change it. And would you look at that, I
found my own good argument to feel sick.
