[843] The Only Way

The broad theme of this is communication. I'm going to try to not shoot too high in how I connect the scattered lines I'm hung up on. The major question is whether or not there is a right way to do something.

We make the argument, often enough, that there is only one way. Implicitly for most things, but explicitly when the danger is more immediate. You are silent in a theater. There's a correct and incorrect side of the road. Jesus.

The deliberateness or explicitness of the task is a dependent variable. It depends on the abstract frame you use to decode the world. If you have nowhere to be except to “transport” yourself, you may walk, ride a bike, be carried, send yourself through the mail, or take mushrooms, and the goal - transportation - is achieved.

This very blog has the goal of quieting my mind as its largest abstract framework. I define what “quiet mind” is. The next layer down is the careful word choices that hopefully you can digest. Together we might frame and conclude if anything has been translated. I hope you can identify your frames and see how they bump into others. I hope to provide resolution to how you and I orient ourselves and decide on goals.

I want “security.” A knee-jerk fear-based response might mean buying a weapon. This boxes “security” into the two hero-story scenarios everyone defaults to when they pretend they are a “good guy with a gun.” A model U.N. participant might regard stabilizing an entire region of the planet as the just and proper means of attaining “security.”

We know the ambiguity in communication so well that we tend to disregard the perpetual pain and consequences of misaligned meaning as “normal.” We settle for “different ways to skin a cat” sentiments instead of digging. We beg to be understood for what was “plainly said” with “common sense” and plead with people to tell us “what you really mean!”

I find business books constantly alluding to psychological studies on why your pitch or good idea doesn't resonate with a big boss's lizard brain. Relationship and self-help books prompt you to define your personality and style to categorize and depersonalize what your frustrated partner might have regarded for years as, “That's just Bill!”

Politically we bicker beyond the point of feeling sick about the ways to “defend the country,” and very often decide there are “sides” that cannot be resolved, somehow both perfectly reasonable, moral, and with their own kind of “rationality.” The consequences, often excessively felt by those hardly represented, serve less to teach something we later correct for than to punish those we disingenuously regard as “merely disagree with.”

As with most positions I try to take, the idea is not to bemoan the very circumstances of life to make some fatalistic throwaway comment. Yes, you can be right and wrong across many dimensions or layers of focus. Yes, we're always seemingly in some form of contradictory position. No less, I think there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things, at the most abstract levels I can imagine. Specific is easy. Right side of the road, or crash. Eat, or starve.

Abstract is whether you should drive at all. This is a broad historical story predicated on the ethics, ignorance, and selection pressures at the start of the combustion engine era. There were angry environmentalists in those days, but it could be easy enough argued that the prosperity from working in a car manufacturing factory at that time, contributing to the boom and technological development of vehicles, and being an earnest part of modern society outweighed the impact of the pollution.

Can you be right about this issue? Immediately, the impulse is to cite individual justifications and get defensive. “How else can I get grandma to the hospital!?” The effort to lose the point makes itself known. I ask myself, if I were offered another means, a sustainable and reliable means to stop driving grandma to the hospital, would I take it? Yes, that's the right way.

This is a huge hurdle. The way we do things, talk about things, and orient ourselves in the world is our entire world. It works, for better or worse, in “maintaining life” as miserably as we conceive of it in any moment. What are you introducing that's more reliable than my car? What problems does it bring? Where's your proof it works as well? While we lose ourselves to the details and fight, poor grandma is left with all the time she has left to contemplate if, in the abstract, she was really the kind of person who should have had children.

Individually, we don't spend a lot of time attempting to frame things for other people unless maybe we're a parent or supervisor (and even then who knows). The trend of recent human history is to cultivate individual frames and feedback loops. Without ever thinking about the consequences of doing so, we start to regard this as the correct mode of interacting and obtaining information. After all, “information obtainment” and or “being entertained” are ends unto themselves, right? What's being communicated doesn't matter as much as that it exists at all. Thus, naturally, it follows we should compete as entertainment or for other resources.

I think this is a wrong way to be human.

Humans are conscious. Consciousness is awareness. “Awareness” is abstract. How to be “abstractly aware” the “right” way? This is the junction where people default to prescribed religious doctrines or a hodgepodge of mangled philosophy with “ist” and “ism” monikers doing the work of lived experience.

Claims of awareness abound. Pastors are aware of what God said to them. Environmentalists are aware of the impact of fossil fuels. Situational awareness is bestowed to the most paranoid or trained. Reliably though, we find ourselves only just-so aware and often tricked by those who understand the underlying forces at play. We'll be able to fool people with the monkey dancing between people passing a basketball video indefinitely.

It already feels impossible to be aware correctly, no? Even the phrasing feels weird.

This is where the humanity comes in. You qualify with acts. Immediately, your awareness coalesces around specific acts. You can arrest other's attention. If and when you become aware of something, you can choose to act in service to your understanding, or lack thereof.

We're about to get in trouble. What do you know? What kind of understanding doesn't beget a feedback loop of isolated self-satisfaction and justification? For before you can get to whether or not you are behaving in the “right” way, you have to find the impulse for truth and honesty.

Uh oh, I did it again, didn't I? I offered two exceptionally boundless words that we routinely treat with every possible interpretation as bedrocks. I didn't put them in quotes, though. I think they exist as far as you can throw them, sure, in varying degrees of focus and relevance, but also as an indomitable consistent base in each of our hearts. Absolutely none of my indignant posture towards other people makes sense without this broad abstract assumption I lay across everyone.

The thing is, I don't know what it is to be human if I ignore that impulse in myself. When I lie, it's disorienting. It's in service to something impersonal, primal, and probably reactively and unduly destructive. If I approach all of our interactions like you're perfectly understood and honestly relaying your experience, I betray the lies in you that I recognize in myself.

Practically, this means I occupy two very different conversational, social, and emotional worlds, and from the outside, they're impossible to differentiate.

You don't have to believe when I write that I'm being as honest as I can muster. If a part of you knows that I am, and you refuse to believe that, we're occupying different plains and I find it impossible to conceive of you as “doing human right.” This is not the same thing as struggling to contend with conflicting information or holding two competing ideas in your head at once. This is about whether or not I have the capacity to speak to, and you have the capacity to hear and recognize, whatever it is at bottom that connects us. I'd like to call it a science without cheapening science.

So you make the decision to be honest and tell the truth. First, impossible, hurdle and footing is done.
Next, you start denoting what you're aware of and stating where you exist relative to it.
Last, you act to change your relative place or in service to consequences the study or science of your experience can reliably predict.

This is doing human correctly and being aware in the right way.

When you hear an “intellectual” tout a series of catch-alls and vagaries that tangibly and reliably beget death and destruction, don’t get lost in their weeds, as they deliberately lead with lies. They pick untruths. You have to believe this about people, just like you can believe it about yourself when presented with the magnitude of your mistakes all at once.

People will deliberately choose death before they will choose honesty. They will do this because a life suffering the consequences of the reality of their decisions would be worse than death. Ironically, they only know this because their bottom-line communication science that understands blogs like this tells them so.

The problem, as our coronavirus times can no doubt attest, is that their choice to die in service to their demons, when scaled up, kills us all.

Thus, you need to return to the exercise. Is it honestly hard to believe people are willing to die and kill those around them, so recklessly, as you consider our violent past or watch them do so every day? Are you allowing yourself to be corrupted, in so many ways, by sympathies and physical or emotional burdens that have entangled themselves to those who are going to get you killed? Can you move in a way that maximizes your chance to survive?

Only once you frame the game and its different layers can you play it. If you're unwilling to do so, it's hard to consider you human. If you're unable to do so, you're likely the kind of person that needs protecting. If you're unable to find protection, you'll be the first to die. Maybe you don't care about who dies, but then again, I reflexively call you inhuman and a liar.