[1140] Bob The Builder

How do you eradicate an idea?

While I think very few conceptualize their behavior this way, I think it’s vital to understanding human history. Science is a process of elimination. Genocide is too. The goal, make it so your ideas are “proven,” insofar as they are the lines of operative behavior we follow.

Science is falsifying. You are trying to be proven wrong. Aggressive physical behavior is trying to “own” or “win.” One ignorantly asserts, the other tries to account for the consequences of ignorant assertions.

If you’re going to take the question seriously, you have to have a grounded concept of what constitutes an “idea.” This is an incredibly complicated task that, when compounded, invokes every science and often begets infinite philosophical regress. An idea can be, literally, the infinite series of forces that a determinist thinks dictate your every moment. An idea can be an amorphous probabilistic potential for collapsing through observation and choices.

To me, as neither a determinist nor sufficiently studied to grasp what it even means to really collapse a wave function, it’s appropriate to look inside. I don’t know if I’ve ever had the capacity to eradicate an idea that wasn’t simply forgotten. And then, “forgotten” is its own bag of worms depending on your understanding of how we embody and encode information.

If I’m like an elephant, and never truly forget, then how have I managed to “cope” or “move on” from ideas that might lend themselves to my undoing, if not outright death? Here we arrive at the word “incorporate.” This implicates much of the dialogue around religious and philosophical works. Isn’t god “everything?” Once you get high enough or meditate deep enough, don’t you lose your sense of individual being and simply observe how you’re embedded into the fabric of existence itself?

I’ve done enough acid and shrooms to colloquially agree with the sentiments, even if I could put on my falsifying and begrudging hat to dismiss a lot of the extra woo-woo connotative baggage associated with “transcendent“ experiences.

It’s here you can diverge wildly on ”norms“ and ”cultural values.“ My concern is about processes or ways of engaging the world and dialogue that incorporate them all. If we created an avatar for ”culture,“ and called him ”Bob,“ how could be interrogate Bob in a way that meaningfully accounted for every difference one might posit between cultures?

We can hark back to a recent blog and simply ask, ”Who, what, where, when, why“ and then watch ”how“ it plays out.

Importantly, here you have to pay really close attention. We’re treating Bob as an individual. The only individual we have any real purchase on understanding is ourselves. If we want to make broad, increasingly incoherent, proclamations about ”them“ or ”the world“ we pack a different bag of characters who more or less dogmatically align. They might align through superficial caricatured characteristics, or they might align in their apologetics, but they ultimately align to service our narrative for illuminating something about them or drawing a contrast between them and us.

If we can maintain Bob as an avatar for our own individual sensibility and culture of influences speaking to how to navigate and describe the world, we have a chance of genuine incorporation and a persistent coherent sense of our motivation. That is, if your Bob is at the mercy of dozens of different ”interpretations,“ and errant opinions, ”you“ never get sussed out and defined. You can no longer be measured against a coherent existential baseline. This makes invocations of ”ists“ and ”isms“ like ”postmodern“ and ”Marxist“ feel tempting and invigorating.

”Ok, Bob, who are you?“

”That’s silly,“ says Bob, ”I’m me, I’m just Bob.“

It’s a deceptively simple answer. It’s both exactly right and infinitely incomplete. Bob is making an existential ”I think therefore I am“ claim without pretext or irony. Bob is Bob, as far as Bob can conceive or is initially begged by the question. It’s not circular because Bob is ”all culture“ condensed and made into an avatar. Bob is a set of incorporated things conceived of in a particular way, right now, the Bob way.

”Hi Bob, so what happened?“

Never forget, Bob is all cultures, so we might infer we’re asking him to explain any/all phenomena. Whether Bob gives a bloated apologetic answer for the metaphysical, a convoluted and contradictory epistemological history, or a somber ”42,“ the answers are united by presumption. They are united by the presumption that there is an answer, the answer can be understood by the entirety of culture, and it is a just and coherent mode of existing to ask, answer, and accept the answer altogether.

By virtue of Bob’s existence at all, and any exchange with him, we’ve laid the groundwork for observing whether ideas fight or incorporate.

”Where,“ ”when,“ and ”why“ are the purview of infinite subjective apologetics. ”How“ turns us to more we can observe both subjectively and objectively.

I’ll play Bob. I can make a statement like, ”I feel terrible about the idea of returning to a normal job, getting back to a 9-5 grind, and subjecting my time and attention to a system I think is almost totally corrupt and inept.“

This is an incredibly complicated sentiment rife with assumptions, feelings, and connotative baggage that may all be entirely useless in determining what either of us needs to from it. Whatever else might be said about the statement, it’s a series of ideas born from the culture in my head. The more I can parse the ideas to their basic or simplest nature, the more I have a prayer of incorporating or understanding them.

”I feel terrible.“

This is wholly subjective. On a scale from 1 to 10, any given day of the week, this ”terrible feeling“ might register from a 4 to an 8, if the extreme ends are clinically debilitating. It says nothing about how long each 4 or 8 lasts, how often it’s a 4 or 8, or whether my ability to cope with 4 or 8 is perfectly suited to do both in perpetuity. All I know is my experience, and barely know it at that. I do not like to imagine myself under the conditions described through the rest of the sentiment. It varies how much that terribleness registers, but terrible is an appropriate approximate summary.

”about the idea of returning to a normal job.“

Here, I seemingly recognize already that it’s an idea first. I’m also suggesting there’s something terrible-inducing about ”normal.“ My cultural understanding, as Bob, thinks ”normal“ ways of behaving in the world are most often and catastrophically destructive. The terribleness is based on conversations, first-hand experiences, and the ongoing observation from my limited window into the world. My bias is informed by lived-experience and, hopefully, reliable statistics that describe why I’ve felt and observed and heard what I have.

”getting back to a 9-5 grind.“

This biased phrasing doubles down and is ever insisting that my terrible cultural feeling gets translated. Can you see the ”how“ starting to manifest? We’ve walked comfortably along the path that’s presuming the truth of my feelings, definitions, and biased phrasing. My bones aren’t getting ground down. I’ve already talked to supervisors at potential jobs about the ability to flex time.

”and subjecting my time and attention.“

The sneakiness is on full display. Here’s where I give up my agency. Here’s where I pretend that every moment is now functionally gone or donated to a caricatured catastrophe of an imagined future. I barely have my attention when I have all the ”free time“ in the world. I can barely sit still and do anything for longer than a few minutes at a time if a compulsive or deeply-interesting arrested sense doesn’t take place.

”to a system I think is almost totally corrupt and inept.“

I’m increasingly of the belief that the messiest things you say come out ”in that extra 5 minutes to speak,“ but I think it manifests in over-long exasperated sentiments like this one too. We’re invoking ”system,“ as Bob, who is ”all culture“ as though we aren’t said system. ”Corruption“ begs for an intimate understanding of how it currently operates, has operated in the past, or what a genuine alternative would do. ”Inept“ suggests it’s so bad it bothered to hire *you.*

Well guess what, as Bob, the ”sentiment,“ ”feeling,“ ”brunt,“ ”thrust,“ ”meaning“ of that statement gets eradicated through the exercise we just engaged in. Upon taking ownership of the culture in my head, and thus the one which I inflict upon the world, I can observe and interrogate my ideas to see if they make any goddamn sense on their face, let alone moment to moment, or across all cultures.

From this exercise I learn that my feelings are so messy and imprecise that they cannot be trusted by themselves. It will never be enough to compel me into one belief or another just because ”I feel it.“

It also teaches me that definitions matter. If I’m provoked by a certain word or description of circumstances, I’m obligated to ensure I’ve truly defined that word for myself and that I understand what someone else means by invoking it. ”Job“ is a huge word. It’s slightly less huge than ”culture“ or ”normal.“ The takeaway is that all words are complicated and imperfect. So the more care you take in how you employ them, the more you might get a handle on the culture you’re cultivating or apologizing for.

Finally, it teaches me how fluidly I can smuggle self-fulfilling language and sentimentality into my performative (il)logic. I’m not being deliberately or maliciously illogical, but I’m not adhering to a logical imperative that transcends and incorporates the whole of cultures encased in Bob.

So, how do you eradicate an idea?

You recognize it’s rarely, if ever, a single idea in the first place. You separate how the idea makes you feel versus what the idea is attempting to convey. You define the words the idea has latched onto. You interrogate those definitions. If and only if they are made robust you can try to exchange those definitions until they can be shared through mutually observable practice.

I can complain all day with my imprecise language, and then get and keep a job for as long as I’m able. I can decry the sickness and pageantry of performative religious morality and pious intellectual spaces, and grant broad utility or normative functionality, and increasingly so as we burrow down into the particulars of how any individual culture exercises whatever we’re presuming to have a conversation about or share an understanding of.

This allows me to say things like, ”Fuck your god, but thanks for feeding homeless people.“ In my culture, you don’t need magic sky daddies and transcendent truth for self-evidently good behavior. You don’t need rewards, gospels, or commandments to feed someone. I don’t need to reflect particularly deeply to know that I would feel bad if I were hungry, or to recall how much food I’ve personally thrown away, routinely, when I worked at a free food pantry. Hunger is easy to subjectively experience, define, and objectively fix. Give Bob food.

If Bob adopts ideas about how much he doesn’t deserve food, or how guilty he should feel as he eats because someone isn’t eating the same as he is, or how not-poisonous the food that’s clearly making him ill is - you either return to the exercise, or develop a chronic coping mechanism, or die.

If you can understand how your culture works, be honest about the details, and engage the exercise in good faith, you start to build a capacity to ask better questions and illicit better emotional responses.

Do I want to experience suffering in how I contemplate my job? No. Can I recognize when the job environment becomes ”too much“ for someone like me? Yes. Am I prepared to write/voice concerns as they arise? Yes. Do I recognize, even if it doesn’t feel like it in particularly dramatic moments, that there are always more jobs and ways to make money? Yes. Do I have a genuine grasp on the level of corruption or ineptness? No, I have persuasive and compelling anecdotes, and limited data. Can I let go of the intensity of my negative feelings and formulate better questions with each new challenging situation I subject to better defining, asking, and answering? Yes. That’s why I’ve continued to write over the last 20 years. I genuinely want to feel better. This is the work of the culture I’d like to enable and see more of.

Because Bob is ”all culture,“ and literally can’t sit in the naked contradiction and discomfort of prima facie ”personal“ or ”religious“ or ”purely subjective“ truths, if you want to be like or understand something in the same way Bob does, you have to work like Bob. You have to build mental and linguistic heuristics that attune to the colloquial missteps that are embedded in how we communicate. You have to recognize when you’re hearing or speaking in bad faith, to yourself, or anyone else.

The alternative is to suffer indefinitely at the ambivalence of your culture’s most painful and consequential ideas. Do you get swept up in fascism, wokeism, any ”ism?“ Are you chanting, screaming, or meme-ing instead of writing your own thoughts? Does your language service a doubling down on depressive and anxious axioms? Do you cultivate a culture of denial and downplaying not just the perniciousness of your environment, but the attitudes that have formed to insulate or cope with it?

Are you Bob, or just living at the mercy of the different houses he’s built?