What matters?
Your perspective? Your will? Your
obligations? Your sense of morality? Your struggle? Look at me,
starting so selfishly; my bias might be showing a bit. Is it really
my bias, or is it just symptomatic of subjective reality?
“If one tethers one's heart
severely and imprisons it, one can give one's
spirit many liberties.”
-Nietzsche
I think I imprison my heart with ideas
of objectivity. I wait and see, watch for cause and effect, then play
accordingly. My “spirit” therefore is free to simply do whatever
it takes for me to draw a desired effect. But does that matter?
I’ll never know explicitly what
someone else is thinking. Even when I exhaust my words people don’t
even believe they know what I’m thinking. I can’t account for the
probability of something going wrong, and I’ll always be using
incomplete information when I make an assessment. To what degree, in
what realm, to whom does it concern where and why I do things? I
think even pushing yourself to hint at asking those kinds of
questions is perhaps a fundamental role people’s gods fill.
And why not? Does it necessarily feel
good to think that you’re unstable? Is hovering doubt a comforting
a feeling let alone message to espouse? Perhaps not. Should you
become arrested by your ideas then? Be unable to even qualify the
word unstable or respect the notion of the ever small “you”
amidst the noise? I chalk it up to intellectual stimulation. When you
go to the top of a building and look over unable to help yourself
from thinking what it would feel like, look like, or do to other
people if you were to jump. Do you really want to jump? Not if you’re
reading this.
And I think that’s what I do. I let
my mind go to scary uncomfortable and downright despicable places
simply because I can, or it does, or I can’t pretend to know of a
reason or method to stop it. Having not gone insane, majorly snapped
or hurt anyone, nor with any plans to do so, I just keep on thinking
like a so-self-described sociopath or psychopath and carry on
business as usual.
But why? What keeps me able to focus or
respect, to even a marginal degree, others’ feelings and my
position in society? Why do I recognize and try to exploit and grow
opportunity? What capacity for positive feelings do I have that
overwhelms a general proclivity to destroy or play with to the point
of absurdity? Why are my rules, my chains, or my tethering ideas the
ones that remain at the top? Maybe because they aren’t mine?
Another argument against free will?
If it all boils down to feeling, then
why bother with intellectual exercises? If you feel a certain way and
you want to feel that way, the only “logic” you care about is the
one describing your capacity to do so. Not very helpful for the rest
of us, but someone will pat you on the head and send you on your way
because they have feelings too and know just how rough it can be.
Yay…If it all boils down to logic, you shoot yourself in the foot.
You don’t know anything, technically, and what you do know
undermines your very being well before said being begins to use its
logic. In comes the all-important context.
Maybe I just need to overcomplicate
things in order to make them simple. I’m opening a business, right?
I have these weird dreams and prospects. Does it matter if I die
rich? If I became a notable humanitarian would the lives I influence
amount to something “meaningful?” Be it 2 or 200 years after I’m
gone, if some problem I rallied against in life is still rampant, how
much respect am I supposed to give to my influence or ideals? For
evil to prevail all it takes is that good men do nothing. But I don’t
believe in evil! I believe there are things that destroy and hinder
goals. Goals I have that can be described as fostering well-being or
happiness in this species. But, my goals are, technically, arbitrary.
They’re assumed in light of my context. Whether I want to help the
poor or cure cancer, it’s all stemming from some primal urge to not
feel bad. I can’t destroy my mirror neurons, nor can I forget what
it’s like to fear or be angry at some injustice, so I’m hijacked
to keep an eye out for “evil” as it manifests.
What happens when I put myself in a
context that no longer fears or is angered by what is “supposed”
to trigger me? What kind of people are the ones that don’t fear
death? Martyrs, who can then do things like crash planes into
buildings because “logically” it gets them and their extended
family into heaven. What if you can no longer get angry at people for
their proclivity to injustice; your empathy literally running out?
Are you now lazy, uncaring, or maybe just exhausted and in need of a
new cause?
We’re clay. We get molded by our
experiences and the environment we’re subjected to. Maybe my mind
goes to “dark” places because I know it is other people with
minds exactly like mine that can do the things I haven’t been moved
to. Maybe in order for things to matter they need to be shaped by
your understanding of the symbiotic relationship between your
thinking and feeling. Maybe I’m just stream of conscious-ing myself
away from the point, which is to keeping putting things in the
context of “what matters.”
I can have all the positive hopes and
dreams for the world that have ever existed, and be working to enable
them every day, and to the people who don’t understand, agree, or
care that doesn’t matter. If I’m working for them, why am I
qualifying it as something that matters? Because I’m so moral?
Because I was put in such a gratifying position until it spilled over
into not-so-heavily-masked compassion for other people? But I don’t
believe in morals! I believe in means. So I just need to expand my
context. I need to identify more squares on the game board. I’m
just playing a game where those kinds of people exist and those kinds
of problems can perhaps not be problems or not infect you and your
style in the way they’re designed to. But again, that perspective,
primarily, if not only, matters subjectively.
I think my biggest anchor resides in
ridicule. For while these seemingly random and stream of
consciousness blogs help me sleep at night, it’s way more fun to
look back and go “you asshole, shut up and watch tv.” It just
feels right to genuinely be interested in helping a problem, have it
go on too long and switch gears, make fun of it and myself for my
role in it, and then move onto the next one. I can only take myself
seriously to the extent that what I say or do has perceivable
consequences. The harder they are to see, the bigger I want to act.
Maybe this is why I find it so hard to take others’ problems as
seriously as they appear to be taking them. I just see someone who’s
usually got good friends, good eats, and a place to live, and they
remain locked in a mental battle. I see myself as someone who, if not
immediately resolves an issue, finds peace with it through writing or
discussion, while they make an issue the center of their life.
So what matters? My ability to make a
big show and validate the idea that things happen and happen for
reasons if that reason is only me and my intentions? A person’s
center-of-their-universe problem, and their endless digressions
analyzing every conceivable angle of it? At this point, it just seems
like the very act of anchoring your mind in something is all that
really matters. Quell the crazy by rooting it in less crazy. Or
over-intellectualize and obfuscate the burden of denoting and
defining crazy. Either way, you’re certainly doing as you think and
feel while abstaining from what you “agree to disagree” (grrrr)
about. It’s kept you safe enough so far.
