[921] Bad Philosophers

I have about a dozen disparate sources of thought I'm trying to synthesize, so don't think too hard and come along for the ride.

Some of the criticisms I've received from writing, if you can consider them as much beyond a personal attack, is that I maintain this posture as offering the capital T Truth of a situation, and that I'm something of a two-bit or wanna-be philosopher. I bring these up not because I find them compelling, but because they are persistent. I certainly don't believe the people keen and quick in offering these sentiments are concerned about the reasons I'd started writing or when I think it necessary to continue.

I don't claim to be a “philosopher” in some kind of formal way. Pythagoras came up with the word to mean a “lover of wisdom.” Anyone can be that, and my demonstration of that love is to search for and attempt to embody the wisdom in the many areas that keep me thinking. The charge about offering the Truth of any or all situations I find exceptionally pernicious and disingenuous. Informally, I've referred to it as “I know you are, but what am I” syndrome. I can say it every day, bookend it on every blog, I don't claim to have the Truth. I have my experience to the best of my ability to articulate and remember it. I'm engaging a process, not dictating a mythological ethos.

I'm watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis with John Vervaeke. I'm about halfway through the 52 hour course. He provides a broad overview of many different philosophical ideas and religious traditions. He puts titanic figures in context and shows how their ideas responded or incorporated who came before. I've read a number of philosophical works, taken classes in college, and written papers or blogs in service to what I've read. You know what never stops? Your need and desire to think about and practice what other thoughtful people have brought to the conversation.

Whether or not you read a book or an argument doesn't mean you understand them, and certainly doesn't mean you've experienced anything like what they're getting at. I recall getting an A on a philosophy paper where I deliberately felt I'd “fuck around” with some modern philosopher's position. I was praised for not merely regurgitating what he was saying, which also would have gotten me an A in a “safe” way, and which the grad student grading the papers was sick of reading. I don't remember the philosopher, or the argument, or how I fucked with it. I just got a deep sense that so much of these “thought experiments” and “professionals” was considerably more loose or playful than you'd suspect at first pass.

Most often, as I'm in the middle of some lecture or hear some salient point made by some nerd on a podcast about climate change or the supreme court, I'm met with how dissatisfied I am with people broadly. I'm struck by how little they think. It's like the whole world opens up as this plaything because I can influence or direct my understanding of what's driving or sucking people up. Are they draped in the nihilism of endless consumption? Probably. Are they exhausted, angst-ridden, anxious, or otherwise adrift looking for a new religion or meaningful supplemental occupation? You tell me, how many people refer to or treat their pets like children? I don't just “dislike” things like Tik Tok or memes, I worry for our collective “soul” that so much has been articulated, but can't find its way into our practice or language. We're addicted to the shortcuts and dopamine flashes.

I've tried to make the deliberate and ongoing point that this process, this writing, whatever it amounts to, is necessary. It's useful. It's how I work to “embody” the things I say and empower the things I do in the world. I can look back through blogs and see what has stayed the same while I've been under constant bombardment from errant criticism, endless distractions, or misguided notions of who I am to people or what they are to me. There's no Dewey decimal system in my head where I can just bring up where and when my ideas of “love” have gone wrong or right. I can't begin to explain what “friendship” has meant or evolved into over time like turning to an illuminating chapter of your favorite book without it being written down.

You may be thinking I'm making some kind of pretentious and overstated claim about how little people are thinking. You, in fact, are very thoughtful, and you have a lot of strong opinions about not just the state of the world, but how I talk about it. For the longest time, I wanted to grant this special privilege to the people able or willing to read what I might discern from the cultural ether. I dropped that. It's not that I haven't experienced you as such or on an appreciable level of awareness or enlightenment, it's that I've watched it fall prey to things I can't reconcile with maintaining respect.

I don't respect silence, for example. I don't respect meme-speak. It's not to say I'm not silent on a great many things or have never shared a meme, but the days where my feed is ten pictures you found mildly amusing, maybe, I don't know where you exist. I feel like I bring this up a lot because it bugs me a lot and I think it's a massive cultural psychosis we've worked ourselves into in normalizing not-think. I want you to hesitate before sharing the picture, then I want you to turn a series of hesitations into a long enough pause to explore what's really going on with you in sharing.

I think about this with regard to my last relationship. In a real sense, this is one of the cleanest, at least emotionally, breaks I've ever had. I had expectations for our interactions that had absolutely nothing to do with some elevated level of “love” or historically romantic notions of our time together. I don't care who you are, if we're going to be “close” or “intimate” or “trust” each other, that's not going to happen if you can't be a friend. My friends aren't routinely yelling at me, giving me the silent treatment, or conjuring memories of growing up where I was hyper tense and aware of the mood-shift so as to avoid getting knocked around by my mother. My friends let me speak without interruption, and I grant them the same courtesy. My friends tell me they're going to do something, and then do it, and if they're going to use me or my things, they express appreciation or know they're on the hook for fucking something up.

I took my time getting into the relationship, and I suffered the things wrong with it until I broke. It's a break that I will learn from and do better next time by not allowing myself to ignore the escalation or mask it under the guise of “accepting someone where they are.” I understand people as having no clue where they are, and it's something I downplay or express some faux humility about at my peril. I understand people as having the kind of mindless irony of an arrested teenager struggling to cope with their incomplete brain and personal trauma. It's not a gratifying point that my home has returned to a place of peace and comfort after removing someone I care about. It's an existentially critical point about how we quell our sense of loneliness or emptiness despite superficially having everything we could ever want.

I'm extremely impressed with many of the book passages and sentiments from Daniel Sherrell who was featured on the Know Your Enemy podcast. He discussed the conditions under which you embody something verses just knowing intellectually. You have to let in the depths of the dread and despair and marry it to the action you take in your day-to-day or long-term, if not infinite, project. Dorothy Fortenberry, also featured in the episode, discussed having kids with no expectations of them ever thanking you or even smiling with regard to your efforts in service to them, and yet knowing you had them for reasons not to do with your own gratification.

What resonated so deeply was a sensibility that I've had to cultivate over time. It's a form of acceptance, not of fate, but of known and unknown conditions. Whatever hell you may be suffering, I can only choose to roll the dice with engaging or not. I can only open myself up, tolerate the vulnerability, and live the consequences of sharing my honest experience. I can't make you accept me, be patient, swallow any of my “reasons” you may regard as “excuses.” My harshest judgments of you either lend themselves to changes in my behavior or mood, or they get used to beat you to death. I can claim a certain awareness of when I'm choosing to beat you to death, like in blowing up at my ex, but it's a wasted awareness if I didn't want to do that and chose to anyway. There's areas in which I'm bound to the notion of getting “license” or “permission” to access parts of me predicated on granting you the agency and responsibility of inviting me in. If I'm bound to a blood-lust like a vampire, I'm forgoing my agency, and thus cannot grant you my honest impression of your agency. I'm then eschewing the responsibility for my actions.

I want responsibility, and begrudging the conditions under which I might yield it doesn't serve me. So that means I don't get “normal” relationships. That means I get to feel “alone,” and any orientation I maintain that baits people or tests people is about me, not them. I don't really know how to reconcile this with what it would take to create or empower a new culture or zeitgeist. I'm not actually a god nor claim some special enlightenment. At some level, it feels like I either maintain expectations I regard as self-preserving, reasonable, and practical, or I drop all expectations and just work people like I know how to work them. Think about it, how many people have you had thank you or shake your hand after you explained you took their children? How many strangers' homes have you been invited into? How many children have you been trusted to drive all over the state with? How many hundreds of people have you invited into your home? How many codes have you had to switch or topics have you had to incorporate to create things that represent your highest ideals?

If you believe, and I use that word liberally, anything less than me about yourself or what you're capable of, by my understanding and definition, you're at my mercy. I can provoke you. I can work you. I can convince you. If you don't know what you're capable of, whether or not you're doing anything for good or bad reasons, I do. I'm not under the illusion that everything I do is for a good or coherent reason. I couldn't take myself seriously if I regarded what you told me as some threatening Truth claim or if I reflexively felt ick and sought to write you off as some lazy airhead. All I can do is make peace with using you until you “wake up” and buy in.

That sounds so crass and cold and feels like the heart of a many years long project I've been trying to avoid. I dance around what I'm capable of precisely because I know what I'm capable of. A cultural project needs the people who are going to be a part of that culture. I didn't party alone, but I garnered all the resentment for the consequences of the party environment, earned and unearned. I can invite you to my land, but you can be stuck linguistically and psychologically reiterating to me it's my land, so nothing you do or invest in is going to matter or be safe from my arbitrary whims. That's fine, but you don't get to retain your skepticism for my aims or good will when I offer it freely or am willing to bind myself to a contract. I want checks on my power and reflection on my aims. You either don't give yourself the power, and thus don't claim the responsibility, or aim at dumb shit.

If what you're accepting about yourself leaves you complacent in what you're willing to discuss or examine, you haven't accepted anything. You've punted your obligation and likely adopted some posture about how busy you are. You've probably reflexively found a way to recognize the faults in others that you can't imagine manifest in you. It's precisely because I am an intractable cunt with an extremely, aberrant, loud mouth and fluidity to his inappropriateness that I've been driven to the desire for an exacting conversation about the forces at play and who is using them. I get snippets of resonant and compelling moments. I get glimpses into the people I wish you were and the person I want to be. But I didn't build my house, start my businesses, or take a chance in my relationships because I lacked a direction or ideal I wished to embody. I don't find patience, and healthy skepticism, or respectful deference from listening only to the feverishly antagonistic demons that foresee and enact every catastrophic end drawn from inferences of your every utterance.

I have everything. My brain works. I'm full. I laugh hard and make jokes. I study. I work on things that are easy for me and hard for others so that maybe they can be free to better handle hard things I can't help them with. I can't recognize the “love” you don't demonstrate. I can't respect negligently wasting power you wish you had, and do have, especially if I show you how it works or give you the opportunity to do the same kind of work I had to do in order to be the one presenting the opportunity. I don't resent people with something to teach me nor am I only willing to learn something on my own terms. I can only work with what's on offer.

I'm offering you 921 insights into my head, 5 acres, my tools, my back, my efficiency, my experience in high stress and high responsibility environments, and my spirit and style of engaging with the world. And who am I to pretend that you want or need any of that, right? Save the handful of my regularly cited exemplars, what is it you think you're offering me? A like? A follow? What are you offering “the world?” Do you want to be just something I keep feeling good or operating well-enough until you've exhausted your utility? Are you my afterthoughts and naive idealism codified by the silence, our histories incidental verses entwined?

I'll weather the scorn or isolation, to be sure. Every shit example I set or shit “friend” I've taken a chance on is quickly followed by the waterfall of prosperity and better examples set by others. I need to maintain the memory of the standards set by you, not me, in how I've been treated. I have friends who don't judge me. I have friends who laugh easy. I have friends who respect my time and effort. I have friends who show up in emergencies. I have friends I start businesses with. I have friends who demonstrate their grasp of their own wickedness or sense of responsibility and maturity without making it yours or my problem. The structure and system are there, because again, I have everything. You find a way to vibe with that or make peace with how you incorporate it, or not. If you're unworthy of what's on offer, well, you're my mom lol.