[1261] Imagine Me And You

One day, I'm going to take every seemingly vague concept we have and build a measurable scaffolding. If it's measurable, we'll call it "real." If it's real, we'll decide on thresholds for calling it "fixed."

Racism
Sexism
Patriarchy
Trans-phobia
Christo-fascism
Islamophobia
Violence

I think, most days, across most issues, most people have a "null" or "non" opinion unless provoked into citing a lazy cliche or repeating whatever they last heard.

This results in an endless nonsense loop of "talking past," "interpretation," and "post-modern obfuscation."

Words are loose. Perception is loose. These are unavoidable. The closest thing we get to "objective" is the collective convergence and ongoing scrutiny. All of our observations added up gives us a moving target, but a target nonetheless.

This means if you're unwilling or unable to add them up, you're functionally not and never talking about "anything." You're not sharing anything. You're not able to situate some goal or claim you have about "the thing" you never reasonably established or made available to anyone else in the first place.

This is the self-justification and ideological possession of what will eventually get us all killed if we don't grasp the nature of it.

Religiosity
Anger/Hatred
Genocide
Values
Morality
Justice

Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.

You have extremely vague approximations of how to conduct yourself and what you're made of. You get sick, things snap into focus. Someone presents a problem or obligation they say is yours, you often dutifully fall into a worker mode that tries to solve it.

You're not allowed to "just exist." you need to work for a living. You need to find a spouse. You need to be into the artists or news channels everyone is talking about. "You" need to be "Us." And "We" are an amorphous ever-justifying narrative exercise. We are what "everyone does" or "anyone would."

The linguistic traps are the air we breathe. The circular side-step of accountable logic is baked into trivially necessary survival. "Have a nice day!" You just checked out of a grocery store with inflated prices owned by a family that refuses to pay its workers more than the "market values."

Is that "nice" for either of you because the job isn't hard, you didn't have to hunt for food, and "all things considered," no one wants the nihilistic take when they are "just trying" to eat or pay the bills?

How often we get away with invoking "the world" or "people" to make a point about either. It's incoherent, but the point was never about coherence. We get high on self-justification narrative exercises. "People are...!" whatever you need them to be in the moment. "The world is just....!" Whatever antagonizes the feeling in the moment.

I think I understand why monks are silent, and when they speak it's something of a seeming contradiction or parable. There's a process by which you can snap things into focus. A king who says we'll cut the baby in half and give both of you claiming mothers a piece. The one who "really cares" says "Fuck that! she can keep him!" And is thus rewarded with the baby.

Anyone can make a claim. The truth of it is an ongoing story pocked with extremely telling reflexive utterances. Maybe both women genuinely care about that baby. One was willing to sacrifice her relationship to it for the baby's sake. A wise king engineered a scenario to illicit impossible-to-discern otherwise information to help him decide.

What about you? You're not a master manipulator of your scene or deciding life and death, right? Or, you're hyper-aware of how that's exactly what you are and it induces all sorts of denial, paralysis, fear, and a doubling down of the self-justification narrative exercise. How do you know?

Catch yourself when you're using cliches.

That's it. That's as robust a first step as you need. Catch when you start a sentence with "people" or "the world." Notice when you invoke "they." Count up the amount of "I can't just..." You'll start to see how often you let "we" and "us" dictate your worth, capacity, potential, or agency altogether. You'll start to feel, viscerally, how often "no one" is talking about "anything." The secret behind why we struggle so hard to cohere as a human race or vestige of an American culture won't be a mystery.

Our technology, or lack thereof, used to compel more of a mono-culture. Our baseline self-justification mechanism could only go as far as our local tribe. The punch in the face of letting it get radicalized could happen much sooner and was materially felt immediately.

We've stretched out the feedback mechanism. The most horrible thing you've ever heard or seen is on a loop to seemingly no consequence. It's tailored to your "interests." Its back is marketed from for more attention and more clicks and more shares. The less anything means something, the more it can manifest in its infinite capacity to distract, incite, or become monetized through your attention.

"We" can never fix what you as an individual can't notice, correct, take ownership and responsibility for, and demonstrate for those in your local, and thus global, tribe.

You have to speak deliberately, for yourself as much as for anyone listening.

You have to stop giving your time to things that do not serve you like a mother willing to let you go.

You have to make demands from and pull power away from those incentivized to make the problems worse.

"Nothing" gets "better" if you can't understand or be bothered to accept how you're contributing to making "things" worse. You don't have to spend money. You don't have to click. You don't have to do anything but catch yourself in the act.

If enough of "us" do that, and count those instances, and dial up or down our behavior in service to "fixing" or "changing" something, like magic, we'll get the world we practice.

It's not hard. It's not complicated. It's not moralizing, theorizing, or experimenting. It's accounting. It's noticing. It's doing, or not doing, and refusing to pretend we're "trying" if we aren't.