[449] Show Me A Hero

I don’t know how to feel considering how much better I feel once I listen to a story or read about the history of war. It’s such an informative subject across so many boards. The characters and personality types. The “rationality.” And depending on how deep the account goes, the forced perspective is unbeatable.

Man is a bumbling animal. Every dramatic and heroic account of our atrocities as depicted in movies or as related through the winners are impossibly removed from living the horror. You can’t describe what it’s like to have enough bombs constantly over-head that it sounds like a drum roll. You can’t understand inhaling chlorine gas for the first time and it altering your conscious state until you’re holed up in an institution for the rest of your life. The depth of what the word “duty” meant so heavily laid on that when you abandon your post you willingly accept the firing squad having full empathy for your commanding officer in his need to set an example.

We try to account. We attempt to take thousands of personal tales and weave them into the “most complete” conception of what we’ve “learned.” But, if we’re lucky, we’ll never have to learn the same lessons in the same ways. The kind of knowledge of doing it first hand, of running the experiment, of beating into your genes a kind of patience or plan that epigenetic studies can only begin to hint at.

What grips me is the sheer horror of it all. How genocide is normal. How concepts like “rules of war” and “human rights” are as gallows-humor as the soldiers hi-fiving a hand sticking from the ground on their way to breakfast. What is the real influence of their struggle? We can study military strategy and history and easily see how drones are practically sent by God when you consider the alternatives. We can look at foreign policy and understand deep-seeded thousand year grudges that predictably knee-jerk to violence when they have to start contending with oppressive language and policies.

I fear the reality of how quickly we abandoned all the pretty things in service to war is immediately and almost deliberately lost with current technology and growing distractions. What I’m torn about is whether or not a pacified and pussified population is worse than one with a thousand year old grudge. Maybe I want everyone in front the of the TV instead of shoveling each other into trenches.

But that’s a gross over-simplification. What prompts people to give up their craft or thoughts of ever again reading poetry is not one particular grievance or point of fact about the horribleness of the other side. Life is fundamentally situated for atrocity. Man is an extension of the universe dominated by entropy. The old testament has god constantly calling for genocide. It’s as “holy” as any hypocritical stance the righteous would like to claim about the “modern man,” be it the relationship to their god in heaven or ghost in the machine.

To that end, any confusion regarding “group psychology” seems to blur into one resounding fact underlying the nature of existence. People laughed on the battlefield. People downright enjoyed themselves, if not to the level Churchill might’ve expressed. Same experiences, different awarenesses. Even the bravest of the brave having their momentary lapses in sanity when the bombardment simply became too much.

That was an account I felt wonderfully pertinent to my mental state lately. I’ve said before I’m not allowed to freak out like other people because I’m always right here. I’m always turning things over and unpacking and challenging. By the time I lose it, there’s gotta be so much bombardment I literally crack without even becoming aware of it until it happens. I can’t wallow in my favorite Nietzsche passages or beckon a depression on Schopenhauer's suggestion before considering forgotten passages from Hume or the Buddha. But I can get drunk for a few days while going into reminiscing and future dreaming overload while reading the exact wrong things about the world, and combine it with a fucked sleep schedule and some minor bee sting-esc annoyance that jams the blender in the on position.

Listening to a talk with Snowden and Tyson I’m prompted by the idea of how interesting it is to ask questions we don’t even realize we need to be asking or will be able to ask. How “boring” what we already know is and the idea of experimenting and integrating a trial and error sensibility into your life can be profoundly consequential. This feels like my very pulse. I want to experiment in business. I want to see what pops up when I combine the right people in the right conditions. I want to organize the soup of spreadsheets and articles I read into something perhaps coherent, marketable, and teachable in a way a half drunk rant about the environment we’re working in will never live up to.

It sort of woke me up that I’m not really doing much experimenting anymore. I’m just taking in various memories or pieces of information. I’m not playing with new technology, attempting to get bored with some new subject, nor even seeing how new interactions play out. And that is as important or integral to what’s going to make me happy as is having good people around or being able to access and work with the information I do have. I want to play more in programming, architecture, and music for example, but I’ve been viewing them as distractions and not ends. They are things I’m supposed to do after I get the real shit established.

And frankly, I don’t know how to talk myself out of that without constantly thinking about how nice it’d be to play scales as opposed to living among rotten bodies and piles of shit wondering when my head will be blown off for standing up. If I had a top ten list, reaching “nerd level” about one or more of the topics above would be in the bottom five, particularly when I consider I want to break capitalism and catalog information at such a specific level it revolutionizes politics practically overnight.

The idea of “staying on message” pops up. Bernie Sanders talks about a ton of things. When he’s addressing his biggest forums, you hear a lot of the same biggest fundamental ideas regarding fundraising, income inequality, and health care. I fear I’ll start to lose myself in “distractions” that require a kind of detachment and dedication that makes what’s really on my mind end up marginalized. Black Lives Matter and wise immigration policies are extremely important, but much of what undermines their goals are influenced by our monetary policy and mindset that comes with it. No matter how good I get at an instrument, it won’t be the grind of the 100 programmers who will promise too much, fail, and waste my time that I’ll have to go through to start building the emotional place in which I’ll be able to take pride in my time spent playing.

I’ve asked before from where do we get our wisdom. It seems just as important to ask how we go about preserving and building it into our systems of knowledge. Is our opinion a thousand years from now about war going to be romantic accounts from preserved 20th and 21st century movies? Are we going to use new machine learning or energy technology as catastrophically as we experimented with new war toys? Can we ever expect to finally and fundamentally circumvent the place of such degradation and horror as to provoke the embodiment of ironic laughter? Can the god, Pain, ever be tricked by an animal who so fluidly embodies his nature and sets the foundation for his home?

I think I begin to feel good when I perceive or hear other people speak to a kind of unity. If The Holocaust was an isolated incident, I’d be genuinely afraid and confused by the Germans. If Rwanda wasn’t old hat, someone would need to start testing Hutu blood. If we couldn’t produce a new movie or documentary every week highlighting someone in power across all points in history who gave the directive to “rid the world of those mother fuckers over there,” I’d have to think violence was random and untameable. That humans were fundamentally flawed in some metaphysically “sinful” way the faithful relish; for how else could they be redeemed and get their eternal reward?

Even if everything is always changing at all times, we can discern patterns. We can correct the tempo and sync the drums. And despite our technology or philosophy, we may still not even know how to begin asking how to do so. But methodically, purposefully, and honestly, we can seek out and record the pulse. We can try to discern the true nature of the animal while it’s still alive. And maybe that’s why the universe would keep playing itself over and over again until it figures it out.