[465] New Balance: Just Do It

There's an intractable virus wriggling around in my mind.

I suppose I don't like the language I've been reading as to how we're supposed to cope. Whether it's coping with different egos or evil, invariably, and it's primarily Alan Watts who's been stuck in my head, him or some other guru type will pull from Eastern mysticism to find the wisdom of balance or being one with everything. Perhaps it's a consequence of not reading close enough, or perhaps there's too many airily employed metaphors, but there's something that's sort of pissing me off in these explanations.

I don't even think the logic is terribly off. The more we persist in quantum mechanical experiments and try to discern the “stuff” we're made out of, it looks more weird and perhaps impossible to nail down because it's changing depending on how we look at it. If you take that everything we conceive of as existing in the universe coming from an infinitely dense point accelerating until all energy has petered out, there's plenty to lie back in awe and think about concerning how weird it is to exist in the first place, let alone find yourself writing a blog about it.

I think maybe I just don't buy the “evil verses good” kind of dialogue. It does not click with me that I'm supposed to “just accept” or smile and move on from those with batshit views. I can understand myself to be capable of ignorance or horrible behavior. The pressing question, “Could any country act like Germany during WWII?” leaves you with years of behavioral and psychological exploration suggesting “of course.” I think it not only impractical, but downright deadly and in defiance of existing in the first place to think of myself in some kind of infinite balancing act with racists, jihadis, or war criminals.

If there's a balance, why can't it be with what we could know and learn as healthy, happy, and informed with the vast nothingness of near immediate death that's accelerating all around us? Why press upon a language of awkward swallowing harmony that feels significantly, more honestly, like worthwhile conflict on the road of progress? Discerning what's “really good” verses what's “good for a capitalist” or “good for a demagogue” could be the cultural endeavor and dialogue. Not this “well they have egos too!” garbage as if I should respect in myself the parts I consider worst about me or my potential.

I think what pisses me off about hippies is that they act like lawyers. They take from, arguably, “high-minded society” to weave together arguments that they'll even call out as failing as they make them, but still it comes across like they're selling you on how to think. Like it's an act of wisdom or meditation to walk some superficial line just because you overburden the implications of your underlying quasi-knowledge about the nature of existence. I don't need to know shit about shit to understand why bombing poor people is dumb. I don't need lessons in existentialism to want my friends to be not threatened by racists. And I don't need a single proclamation about the will of god to know yours is fucked up when it calls me evil and wants to kill me.

Watts' kind of understanding seems to breed complacency. In one hand he'll say something like “we should support welfare systems” but then explain that what people desire after they get the basics can't be filled by consumption, so we should instead focus our efforts on a kind of spiritual or perspective-broadening awakening. Practically, can we at least ensure everyone gets a chance to contemplate how TV doesn't make them feel at one with the universe before we believe care packages of food need to include Watts' book?

Or there was a section about “spiritual one-upmanship” in which people so humbly try to distance themselves from their accomplishments or capacity to understand because of some deeper truth they get about their relational existence. So it goes, you'd be unwise to consider yourself better or worse, nay, those distinctions only arise from a comparison, so then what? You shouldn't take pride? You shouldn't call what you do better? Your “problematic ego” will only be bolstered by it's own ignorance? FUCK YEAH, why not? I think people who try to organize their thoughts are better than those who spout off and follow ignorant bullshit indiscriminately. I think people who take the time to think, even if it's to come to “gooey” conclusions like Watts, occupy a place of genuine “higher” value and order than those who are going along for the ride.

The fact is, we don't get to play with all the facts of our existence. We get what our senses and our brains can cobble together. Those are the rules. The underlying reality is practically (until we can use the math to build something cool) irrelevant. Maybe to state that more explicitly, by way of conversation, it's important to understand ISIS are people in contemplating conflict resolution. It's important to understand the consequences of ignorance in demonizing terms. Maybe, right now, asking what the double-slit experiment means for our foreign policy hurts more than helps. This isn't to denounce philosophy or avoid avenues to be inspired, but “in reality,” the underlying fact is still “we don't know.” Drawing up a book attempting to guide practical or “more rational” behavior and how to properly pursue “enlightenment” when you fundamentally don't know something is a properly ignorant religious exercise.

I'm never going to smile and clasp my hands around my Yin-Yang necklace when there's a gun to my head secure in the knowledge that it's my ego's time to balance out the scale and be re-born as another “I” in a baby somewhere. When you bring his examples and state them like that, the whole exercise of being “merely contemplative” feels a lot more like “struggling to justify shitty religious thinking.” I can know I'm not apart from the whole as far as my particles, (oops, calling them “mine”) but that in no way makes me okay with strangling the word “objective” out of my lexicon. As far as anyone who's suffering is concerned, life isn't art for art's sake.