[745] The Distance

Today, I sat in my car, just a touch before “impatiently,” as a child cried in her mother's arms, her sisters gave her a hug, and as she stole away a few minutes to see young cousins of hers who she refers to as, “my babies.” Her sister walked with her arm in arm to the door of my car, and they reached out to clasp hands through the window telling one another they loved each other. The child cried out to her mother, “I love you mommy!” who looked at my car with tears in her eyes as she waved goodbye, telling her daughter that she loved her too. Every face was sad, and the weight of what this family was going through sat in the heaving chests of everyone there. Everyone, except me.

I don't need to make a point about how we tell stories or share perspectives to sound more or less dramatic. That's too easy and old news, especially from me. I don't need to ring the bell of my general lack of emotionality or indifference. I don't need to describe this family in all of my subjectively overly judgmental ways that would more than a little muck up the initial description of that scene above. And yes, I needed to lay out all the things I don't need to do, because my mind went to those places first in what I'm assuming was a shortcut as it's going to take some digging to figure out what I want to say.

Some more grounding, I watched a lecture on consciousness. In the presentation there were those fun visual and audio examples that show you how much of your experience is your brain's “best guess” as to what's going on. I immediately thought of writing. I thought of every indictment I get about some grand proclamation I've made no matter how much I insist I'm just poking around in the busy darkness. These words are my best approximation of a fleeting idea or feeling, always. They are “right” insofar as they provoke me to continue thinking. They are “wrong” as long as someone has something to contribute or contradict.

But let's focus on the brain guessing. You see more of what you've been primed to see. For people who think advertising doesn't work on them, they don't realize they don't have a choice. You've been seeing McDonald's commercials your entire life. Just like Coke or certain car brands. They have taken up residence in your head whether you like it or not. I think I pretty consistently ask people to examine the “spells” and other people's “hells” they've been primed and conditioned by. That might be an easier exercise by saying things like, “My brain guesses such and such is true after experiencing this think piece/podcast/opinion/etc.”

You can strip away the emotionality. I suppose you first have to desire to strip away the emotionality, but if you do, you gain access to what might be considered privileged knowledge by the rationally irrational or disingenuous. Let's ground that sentence. I've been listening to Mark Blyth. A political scientist, who as plainly as a political scientist can manage, lays out the assumptions and standards, or basically bullshit, our major institutions run on. He's not “above it all” in that he's got some secret knowledge. He's just blunt, and discusses as practically and mathematically as he can what happens when you have X and Y under Z conditions. He rids his discussion of “perfectly rational consumers” or worshiping at the foot of GDP.

Blyth discusses the plight of Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, who persistently calls bullshit on how different institutions run, and was subsequently blackballed. It didn't matter if he was right. It didn't matter his expertise. He made enough people who make giant sums of money feel bad. Their perception, the businesses and schools they've been primed and conditioned by, were “more true” than what he had to say. A tale told a thousand times in my own life with considerably less damning conclusions or money at stake.

What I find compelling about people like Blyth, or Taleb, David Graeber, someone like James Baldwin, or the gangster turned reformer, or ideologue turned atheist is how in it they actually are. It's the people not criticizing from the outside, but who spent or continue to spend their lives immersed in learning about their particular worlds. They observe. They offer. They preach. And you can pick them out individually from a million different people because they've chosen a mode of being that tirelessly works to relate as much of the truth as they can see it.

I don't even think that impulse is “wanting to help” as much as it is being responsible enough to not play along with demonstrable harms. What frustrated “intellectual,” drinking or driving themselves mad, believes they help a good goddamn thing? No. They just read and write and conduct their affairs and for one reason or another, they're not arguing with it, they keep getting invited to talk. Jordan Peterson has made the point that he certainly has a number of topics he could talk about in a more coherent and informed way, but that list certainly isn't inexhaustible, and perhaps it's time to take a step back and learn more and formulate new lecture series. What a Chomsky thing for him to do.

Okay, so I've started this by describing a tearful goodbye, and we've gotten to the point of hand-jobbing my intellectual heroes. Is that where I wanted to go? I originally thought to title this blog The Distance, because it's always how I've felt in relation to things. Distant. Not “isolated” like the kid too scared to play the sport or show off his brains or ask out the girl. I'm not upvoting every suicidal /r/meirl or /r/2me4meirl post. I'm not walking away from my different conceptions of “friend” or “friend group” more scarred than informed. I don't begrudge people their happiness no matter how long I may testify to the underlying lie at the heart of “love.” I'm just removed from it. I play with it at my peril, not, as my friend was eager to point out, because I don't know what to do, but because I feel more responsible than to play along with what I can mostly describe as demonstrable harms.

We can take a less dramatic example than any individual family crying goodbye, or any one person's subjective experience of love, and just consider the nature of my job to begin with. I bought in, in some tired and pragmatic sense, to a fundamentally corrupt structure. Interject yourself into people's lives, at least for 22 hours a week, and pretend you've been given any direction or credential that can speak to their addictions, abuses, or otherwise neglect. Join up with the people saying, “We're helping!” in the face of everything they've never read about how our brains work, what environment these people are embedded in, or what's in store for them when we leave, or even as a country, as we ignore the roots of what contributes to their circumstances.

As a not idiot, I know I have to buy in somewhere. I know I'll die a measure of hypocrite. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to call it anything but hypocritical, even and especially when I may be due less admonishment than I'd reflexively give. What people don't want to believe, and this is how they are “rationally irrational,” is that you can criticize and try to change your corrupt structure while you're working inside of it. That's the extra responsibility. That's the “fight” I get into in writing emails and letters detailing very fixable things that nobody gives a fuck about fixing. I do. You're going to know I do. You're going to know the reason I dislike or can no longer work with you before I go. That's important. It's not just bitching and complaining. It's opening a door towards something better, and inviting people in, or providing yourself with the exact proper reason to move on and try somewhere else.

And how often can you do that? You have to structure your life in a way that attempts to force through behavior in service to the most important things. For all of the pain that it's taken, when I have my land inching along, nothing else makes more sense in the world to me. Every last gripe I've ever had about the nature of the tasks I've been subjected to, the long-term consequences of ignoring the difficult truths, and the potential to cultivate a kind of creative and removed environment is embodied with every killed weed, new structure, or dug hole. The greatest good I could ever as an individual bring to the world will come out of the ongoing work I do to make that land into an analogue for my mind. When what I hope to shape people with, that I never might do with my words becomes manifest, now they can be as taken with it as I've been taken by my experiences.

I've been feeling it more recently. The “comfort.” I get paid regularly now. I've gotten over my indignant stance on “normal” jobs. Well, not really, but I've adopted the same attitude towards it that I did during school. I'm not an idiot, it's either this or poverty or I'm likely just going to be watching TV because I don't have the money or help to move like I want to. I've lived the infinite downtime study life, the work every day mania, and my “normal” has resolved to some measure of over-doing something somewhere no matter what, so I might as well play bureaucrat, right? At least I might get health coverage for a year or so.

But what I became more aware of was the dimmer on that desperate drive and belief that I could do anything at any time. I was just as earnestly going to start a moving business as anything else. I could get the truck fixed and engine paid for right now. I'm not running out to do so as I still need power, a bathroom, a driveway, and now a consistent time I could even bother to do anything but sneak in TV and times to shit. It's so, so quick and easy, to get comfortable. It's the underlying backbone of the perpetuation of our species. People don't think twice about having kids or what they are really doing to themselves or the world by engaging in their job verses “the work.” Because, you don't have to. I could keep a kid alive in better circumstances than the places I drive these people to. I would want considerably more for my children than them simply being alive. I'm not an animal.

I think this blog speaks to my “spirituality” for want of a better term. I believe in the transcendent. I think there are truths and uses of information that are timeless and important and worth pursuing. I think you can be persuaded to live against all objectively obvious reason to creep over the double yellow line or plunge right into the lake. And I think I find my “god” in the embodiment and manifestation of the story only I can tell, the environment I can create, and the relationships that very much need me there to taste like me. I want to be so immersed that while I'm flipping through people like reddit links, I'm more me than I could ever talk about, and more me to other people than some empty prostration or matter-of-fact description pretending to have a handle on it all. I don't want to be stuck in the past, I want to transform and evolve it. I don't want my head on a pike for all my sins without climbing up to redo the hair or gloss up the lips.

As the faithful signs read on my drive out to the land, “Jesus is coming, ready or not. Heaven is Real” Well, rationally irrational monkey man, so am I. And the world I create will certainly feel more real than Heaven ever has. Just ask the increasingly long line of people who just wish I'd shut the fuck up.