[1159] About Ten

 I want to run a few thought experiments. The task is to say, “What if what was said is even 10% true?”

I’ve been going back and reading/listening to some of my old writing. Sometimes, I come across a blog that’s blisteringly drunk and “embarrassing” insofar as I might compare it to how I speak and write now. It doesn’t mean that version of me isn’t still there, but I can more easily identify the weaknesses in its voice and character. I care about voice and character because I want to make sense and discover operative ways of being. To recognize, starkly, how often I can get in my own way is instructive.

That doesn’t mean that what I was writing about wasn’t true. You can’t adopt or discover operating principles if you don’t first start with a foundational pursuit, respect, and recognition of the truth. I was, truly, coming from those places, even if today they’re less intense. I can’t treat the sentiments as a raging hot inferno of “things we all must realize” or “be all end all” fatalism of a One True Opinion, despite their phrasing. They are no less informative and emotionally resonant at some level. It’s at least 10%.

This got me thinking about answers that snap into focus if you frame them like this:

“If it was even 10% true that Palestine will not accept a 2-state solution and desires the expulsion and extermination of the Jews, what would you do?“

”If it’s even 10% true there’s genocidal things being carried out by Israel, what’s the next step?“

”If it was even 10% true that an extremely messy and disingenuous political prospect and his followers wanted to overthrow the government, what would you do?“

”If it was even 10% true your partner was verbally and emotionally abusive…?“

“If it’s even 10% true that you’re being lazier, angrier, deceptive, quieter, more obnoxious, defensive, etc. than you need to be, what does that mean for what to do next?”

I think when you do this, it gives you the opportunity to introduce critical thinking. You see responses to absolutist phrasing, and you see the back-and-forth leveraging of specific atrocities and hyperbolic language ad nauseam. “They’re killing babies!” If it’s even 10% true, then surely we can agree it’s atrocious, and then move the conversation into the realm of context and history. Israel didn’t raid Palestine and start killing its children. They’re playing 2 different games. Israel hasn’t mandated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s literally impossible to carry on a conversation with someone who can’t qualify even the possibility that “their truth” and “your truth” might exist at all, but maybe only 10%.

That leaves 90% of space for the “real work” of agreeing to context. The 10% is the good faith, but it’s hardly enough to find a negotiated middle or consensus. We complicate this further by misidentifying who or what constitutes an immovable ideologue. I think this is why it’s most important to apply this exercise individually and with regard to your subjective experience.

I’m persuadable. That’s only because I come up with the arguments that make sense to me. Screaming at me isn’t persuasive. Demonstrating you have a looser or incomplete grasp of the facts than I do turns me off. An unwillingness to consider or introduce relevant details does too. If you can’t take what I say and repeat it back to me in a way that demonstrates understanding, I don’t pretend we’re having a real conversation. In the abstract, words are ever imprecise, sure. There is a realm where you understand not to put your hand on a hot stove. Even and especially if you’re the type of cunt who promises you like that kind of pain, hate your hands, and would lay your forearm across the adjacent burner to really sell it.

Most of the time, you don’t need to entertain the “most damming” or “craziest sounding” or, in the language of recovery, “catastrophized” version of events. We feel at 100%. We react at 100%. That’s fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We’ve thrown this into overdrive with algorithms. We’ve let then 10% of propaganda and arbitrary associations dictate our operating systems. Even if the craziest and most shocking thing was 10% true, the next step isn’t to swing dramatically into the arms of whomever said it or decry the evil as though you’ve confirmed or worked to establish the 90% of the context.

“They’re eating dogs!”

Some cultures do eat dogs. Do I know enough about Haitians? No? Okay, are they one that eats dogs? No? Okay, 10% acknowledgment that dogs are meat to some people, Haitians aren’t one of them. Time to move on.

“Global warming will kill us all!”

If that’s even 10% true, give me the charts, like on the latest series attempting to rehab Bill Gates’ image, that show what’s contributing. Give me a budget. Show me the leaders and investments. Let me listen to the scientists describing the damage. I don’t need to cry and scream with you, nor am I the enemy for my desire to build the context.

Let’s do a personal one. “This job will kill my soul and make time feel insufferable.”

I’ve already adopted behaviors that mitigate this. I fill in dead air with podcasts, shows, and books. I build efficiency if I’m driving somewhere and have several things to get done throughout the week. I document, both work-related incidents and my experience when it reaches acute levels of dread. I’m already prepared to leave and continuously apply or search for the next thing. It’s not either I’m suffering at the ambivalence of my worst phrasing or I’m thriving. It’s all at once all the time provided I do the work of identifying the nature of the context and continue making decisions.

After a while, you might start to phrase it like, “That’s not true enough to matter.” You might start to feel that way so you can move on quicker until you run up against something that does. You don’t have to guiltily indict yourself by saying something like, “I don’t care about dead babies!” or “Fuck climate change!” or whatever the issue may be that day. You can begin to understand how genuinely removed and ignorant you are about most things in any given moment, and how the work to contextualize probably doesn’t interest you. You can put some distance between your feelings and the propensity to feed and justify them.

This absolutely does not happen incidentally or just because you get old. This takes work. You have to actually want to be accountable. It’s only if you want to recognize and entertain without being an embodied perpetual reactionary. This, I suspect, is less than 10% of any given population at any point in history. If that’s even 10% true, the burden to those of us trying to do better is the 90% of nonsense, instinct, patterns, norms, and undulating nature of consciousness as it bumps against technology.

What does that mean for how you should conduct yourself each day? What does that mean for the words you’ll choose? What does that say about the lines you’ll draw for acceptable exchange? What does it say about the work you have left to do in order to adequately shoulder that burden? There’s something to react to constantly. Are you sure you have the real desire and energy to even want to do better?