[230] Inside Outside Box

I need to learn more. What I learn needs to influence what I do more. When I say more, I mean it needs to extend some branch of “understanding” that I can only find frustration in currently. I suppose a good gauge of whether I am progressing is the more I feel engaged, happy, and productive. These of course predicated on how you know or can come to know about yourself and the various ways you can relate to people.

This whole notion of progress is frustrating. The only reason I have goals is because I picked them, or at least felt like I picked them; it wasn’t because they were magically revealed to be truer or better. The problem is when I realize how easily it is to think in a contradictory manner. How often or easily your once heroes can be taken down. What ideal do you hold “sacred,” terrible word, when foundations of your thought are proven to be untenable?

I’ve picked goals. To be as happy as possible as often as possible while understanding the various and often conflicting means to happiness. I want to enable my friends where possible. With these broad goals it’s easy to move to the specifics. I want to run a business, coffee shop, learn taxes, make money, etc. under that context. I adopt words like “utility” and drop words like “love” in order to better understand and express those goals. I want to create an internally sensible world that doesn’t pretend there isn’t an overlying, potentially chaotic and horrible, objective context.

I don’t like things to get dramatic. Why do we have to wait for a revolution before we figure out why and how government should be run? Why do we have to wait until the planet fights back when we screw up the environment? Why does the middle class have to disappear before we even acknowledge class inequality? Why do you need to be sick before wanting health care? Why do we strive so hard to be extremely wrong first? Is there really some ultimate annihilation button at the proverbial end if we decide to tip the balancing scales towards uninhibited objective realization?

I don’t want to care. Does that make things self-fulfilled or am I just holding out for the right time? I mean, I already care, so how can I not want to? Care about what? Well, myself, my friends, my shit, my ideas. It follows that I would care about the world, our political climate, emotional and mental stability and ability. What if the real questions is, how connected are we?

Perhaps an analogy for the world: Is it like saying you're like an apple, but part of it is rotting, and you try to eat it anyway? There are still good parts, but it’s still rotten. Can people be a barrel of apples? Can we simply chuck the rotten ones until they decompose and simply provide more soil over the next cycle? I suppose not as long as other stupid apples fall in love with the ones who are rotting. And, one of those rotting apples is threatening to die as the sole bearer of the knowledge on how to cure pimples, asshole.

So these apples can provide something, even while they are rotting. Maybe a deeper insight understands the capacity of every apple to rot. But an apple left on the ground doesn’t choose to be there. Either directly or indirectly it fell or perhaps thrown to its current position. It’s not like other apples can go pick it up, whether they had the capacity to care to or not. Maybe people should stop acting like apples.

Do we have a societal goal? It can’t be that whole life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness bullshit. Really, you can’t tell me war for oil, prison time for weed, and deregulated markets drew from wells extolling those ideals. That’s called the wrong kind of “selfish happiness.”

What if we had tactical kidnappings? We bust into foreign or warring countries, take the people doing a ton of bad shit, imprison them, but treat them like they are normal or potentially valuable people. You kidnap them, and put them up in a prison/hotel. Let them Skype with their brethren back home and learn how not-give-a-shit Americans really are let alone be in direct opposition to their favorite sky daddy. Of course the ones left who no longer wanted to fight or be indoctrinated would be threatened with death if they defected here, but it can’t be any worse then they’re current standing. 

What if we flew in and carted tons of people to be relocated in other countries who were equipped to handle new social and cultural programs, not unlike this melting pot of America and simply made sure that we treated other people well? You don’t force those that don’t want to leave and you don’t impose on those that don’t want to or can’t handle. You just provide the opportunities and make more examples out of people. What’s more convincing that someone’s own family member in their own language?

I guess that was my random let’s explore this idea moment after I wrote through initial frustration. I can’t help but to default into something “seemingly productive” once I think I’ve found a place for the bullshit.

I guess all I can do is keep living vicariously.