[898] Both Ways

I'm still thoughtful about a status I wrote this morning, copied under the blog, and after listening to part of an episode from Know Your Enemy discussing a prominent Jewish leftist who turned conservative while mixing in the intellectual circles of the 50s and 60s.

 

I try to emphasize in moments between frothing that I'm but one, infinitely small, window into the world, often befuddled, confused, and barely approximating the language that would “best” describe where I'm coming from. I approach sharing and vocal exercise with the idea that they are stomachs that need feeding or muscles that need stretching and conditioning. It's an analogy for everything worthwhile or terrible in life. You are what you do, or if you're stuck trying, what you're working on and shooting for.

 

As such, walking the line between “what I feel” and “how I think” can seem perfectly arbitrary or endlessly ambiguous to someone reading a blog in isolation or who is wholly unconcerned with giving me any credit. If I doubt that my tone or word choice was altogether awesome, I'm gonna bring it up. I'm gonna ask myself why and make another pass. A lot of that is just work I think you do as an individual to keep yourself honest. I want you to believe I'm doing my best, but I also need to be confident that it is, in fact, my best representation of the moment, if nothing else.

 

I want new ideas. It underlies why I bother to be an “everythingist” about life. I watch all the shows for a line or character I haven't met before or a point of connection with a stranger where something harder to recognize is never known. I want to have a perspective on different mediums of story-telling, like podcasts, and attempt to discern the “best” messages I've been missing or strategies for explaining something in a skillful way I lack.

 

In Know Your Enemy, the hosts are very giving of their praise and cutting in their criticism for different writers. I might choke at the idea of a “conservative intellectual,” but it means something that has practical and longstanding implications. They read the books. They describe the psychology, justifications, and emotional tenor of people compelled to functionally destroy what may otherwise be a salient opinion of fiscal responsibility or foreign policy but for all of the racism and ego. They point out how weird it is for a prominent public figure to brag about his A+ grades at 35 and to ignore his “self-made” conception of success started with a publishing company passed down from his father.

 

I really don't want to be that dumb. I try to incorporate the people that have shaped my perspective and drive. I try to shower praise and include your perspective into the larger project. It is very real for me how little I can do alone. That comes with it the burden of making sure people grasp and respect themselves and relative place in the picture so you can honestly discuss how to move forward. That comes with some actual vocalization and engagement with perspectives that are different from yours and approaching them with the patience and openness to ask more than tell.

 

For whatever I do in fact excel at, I have extreme deficits and perfectly visible blind-spots that almost everyone is keen to keep secret from me. Occasionally when they interject, I have a habit of pointing out a contradiction or confounding variable that becomes the pivot to a meta-discussion about the discussion and eventual derailing. One such instance is the offered argument that “I need to take responsibility for how I come across.” Superficially easy to say and agree with right? That alone is good advice when you're dealing with a world that is going to judge you and hold power over you. What happens when you breathlessly move on to your next argument that “you shouldn't care what people think?”

 

The details start to matter. Well, you should care about what the people close to you think, but not the ignorant masses lazily judging. You should at least vocalize you are taking responsibility for your “harsh” language, and then continue to do it anyway. When we feel personally attacked, we want the other person to take responsibility. When we feel we're “just being honest,” fuck the haters.

 

I don't believe you get anywhere if you don't start honest and believe the other person is too. Norman Podhoretz, the conservative on focus of this podcast episode, was friends with James Baldwin. He went on something of a racist tirade towards Baldwin who told him to write all of his grievances down and publish it, which he did, and it became a notable historical essay. I love this story, because I regard James Baldwin as an extreme truth teller first and foremost concerned with the truth. He didn't lash out and fight back, he said put that naked ass of your honest expression on paper to someone very comfortable displaying their naked ass, fast forward 50 years, we get a coherent throughline and useful perspective on how to discuss racist cultural issues.

 

I want a zeal for accountability. I'm fine with “crazy” people, so long as they are honest in their craziness, and we honestly account for their influence or what we're going to do about it. There are sincere racists that I want us all to be on the same page about how large we empower their influence. There are 74 million proud fascists which you shouldn't shy away from calling fascists. Your boss or owner is probably greedy and proud they sit above you, high on the perch of their small window. Lazy and loose talk will allow you to try and have it both ways, a false notion of your own righteousness married to perpetually justified ignorance of the many roles you're playing in destroying what we need to survive.

 

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From daily life to catastrophes, I can't shake the thought that it's a product of over-thinking. Over-thinking is not critical thinking. Over-thinking is coming to a relative or often obvious conclusion, and then doing nothing. Over-thinking is a coy held-harmless description about agency and taking responsibility for the moment.

 

I haven't been particularly anxious this week of snow days and very little money making. I'm not worried about the bills, the car or shed debt, or myself as an ardent TV watcher. This morning the sinking stomach started. I'm reminded how good I felt being able to pick up scrap again. I'm going to see how my play to leverage a new job works to let me make something worthwhile out of my current one.

 

It's obvious I should be paid enough to live and reward what I do. Every day I don't build how I'm going to live the obvious truth and consequences of that is on me. The "cling to practical" model of how to cope in two-week stints is obviously a path to hell. I'm not anxious about advocating for myself. I'm anxious about how hopeless it feels to do so. I'm hearing the "professional" excuses. I'm anticipating the open questions and work of mitigating an attitude that has crippled how we are to conceive of and relate to ourselves.

 

I want so little and increasingly obvious things. It makes for a stark contrast when I evaluate how little the systems I'm plugged into are designed to provide for those wants. If I want to grow, the system wants me in debt. If I want to show up and work every day, the system gives me an endless sea of entertainment. If I want more responsibility, the system says we should hold several meetings to dissect this curious notion of "responsibility," and maybe you should consider "doing your job."

 

I'm to believe that "fixes" or "hope" lies in some "generational struggle." These systems are failing me every day. They're freezing Texans to death. They're starving children. They're addicting you to opiates. The excuses for why the world feels like shit are happening right now. Can you hear them? Can you recognize the familiar patterns and design?

 

Why don't we, obviously, hold ourselves accountable? Why don't we force power to pay up? Why don't we strike? Do you want dramatically more than me at the expense of everyone else and the future? Why are you quiet? Why are you pretending you are a "good person" who can sit and wait until "the world" will bother? Are you a coward, or cunt?

 

Listen to the array of excuses and pleading for sympathy that washes over you from the last question. Feel the guilt. Watch how you ignore the real enemy and focus on my tone and word choice. Then forget this moment when someone pats you on the head and dismisses your needs in a "polite," professional, political manner. Come back to your easy target when you can't sort your feelings out, but you'll be damned if you're not going to continue thinking and praying about it. And you don't need my negativity trying to provoke you.

 

There is no hero if you're not one. It's obvious, at least to me, that I'm not the problem or enemy. I speak. I fight. I create. I state my goals and work on them. I pay attention. Do I want allies? If I could recognize any, sure. I'm not alone, but our club is too small for the size of the problem. It's got its own obligations and personal problems too. But it stays honest and fights back. It remains open and informed. It wants to isolate and judge and believe you can be left alone to suffer your decisions. But it knows the consequences of abandoning the project. The cancerous cultural mass is consuming us all.

[745] The Distance

Today, I sat in my car, just a touch before “impatiently,” as a child cried in her mother's arms, her sisters gave her a hug, and as she stole away a few minutes to see young cousins of hers who she refers to as, “my babies.” Her sister walked with her arm in arm to the door of my car, and they reached out to clasp hands through the window telling one another they loved each other. The child cried out to her mother, “I love you mommy!” who looked at my car with tears in her eyes as she waved goodbye, telling her daughter that she loved her too. Every face was sad, and the weight of what this family was going through sat in the heaving chests of everyone there. Everyone, except me.

I don't need to make a point about how we tell stories or share perspectives to sound more or less dramatic. That's too easy and old news, especially from me. I don't need to ring the bell of my general lack of emotionality or indifference. I don't need to describe this family in all of my subjectively overly judgmental ways that would more than a little muck up the initial description of that scene above. And yes, I needed to lay out all the things I don't need to do, because my mind went to those places first in what I'm assuming was a shortcut as it's going to take some digging to figure out what I want to say.

Some more grounding, I watched a lecture on consciousness. In the presentation there were those fun visual and audio examples that show you how much of your experience is your brain's “best guess” as to what's going on. I immediately thought of writing. I thought of every indictment I get about some grand proclamation I've made no matter how much I insist I'm just poking around in the busy darkness. These words are my best approximation of a fleeting idea or feeling, always. They are “right” insofar as they provoke me to continue thinking. They are “wrong” as long as someone has something to contribute or contradict.

But let's focus on the brain guessing. You see more of what you've been primed to see. For people who think advertising doesn't work on them, they don't realize they don't have a choice. You've been seeing McDonald's commercials your entire life. Just like Coke or certain car brands. They have taken up residence in your head whether you like it or not. I think I pretty consistently ask people to examine the “spells” and other people's “hells” they've been primed and conditioned by. That might be an easier exercise by saying things like, “My brain guesses such and such is true after experiencing this think piece/podcast/opinion/etc.”

You can strip away the emotionality. I suppose you first have to desire to strip away the emotionality, but if you do, you gain access to what might be considered privileged knowledge by the rationally irrational or disingenuous. Let's ground that sentence. I've been listening to Mark Blyth. A political scientist, who as plainly as a political scientist can manage, lays out the assumptions and standards, or basically bullshit, our major institutions run on. He's not “above it all” in that he's got some secret knowledge. He's just blunt, and discusses as practically and mathematically as he can what happens when you have X and Y under Z conditions. He rids his discussion of “perfectly rational consumers” or worshiping at the foot of GDP.

Blyth discusses the plight of Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, who persistently calls bullshit on how different institutions run, and was subsequently blackballed. It didn't matter if he was right. It didn't matter his expertise. He made enough people who make giant sums of money feel bad. Their perception, the businesses and schools they've been primed and conditioned by, were “more true” than what he had to say. A tale told a thousand times in my own life with considerably less damning conclusions or money at stake.

What I find compelling about people like Blyth, or Taleb, David Graeber, someone like James Baldwin, or the gangster turned reformer, or ideologue turned atheist is how in it they actually are. It's the people not criticizing from the outside, but who spent or continue to spend their lives immersed in learning about their particular worlds. They observe. They offer. They preach. And you can pick them out individually from a million different people because they've chosen a mode of being that tirelessly works to relate as much of the truth as they can see it.

I don't even think that impulse is “wanting to help” as much as it is being responsible enough to not play along with demonstrable harms. What frustrated “intellectual,” drinking or driving themselves mad, believes they help a good goddamn thing? No. They just read and write and conduct their affairs and for one reason or another, they're not arguing with it, they keep getting invited to talk. Jordan Peterson has made the point that he certainly has a number of topics he could talk about in a more coherent and informed way, but that list certainly isn't inexhaustible, and perhaps it's time to take a step back and learn more and formulate new lecture series. What a Chomsky thing for him to do.

Okay, so I've started this by describing a tearful goodbye, and we've gotten to the point of hand-jobbing my intellectual heroes. Is that where I wanted to go? I originally thought to title this blog The Distance, because it's always how I've felt in relation to things. Distant. Not “isolated” like the kid too scared to play the sport or show off his brains or ask out the girl. I'm not upvoting every suicidal /r/meirl or /r/2me4meirl post. I'm not walking away from my different conceptions of “friend” or “friend group” more scarred than informed. I don't begrudge people their happiness no matter how long I may testify to the underlying lie at the heart of “love.” I'm just removed from it. I play with it at my peril, not, as my friend was eager to point out, because I don't know what to do, but because I feel more responsible than to play along with what I can mostly describe as demonstrable harms.

We can take a less dramatic example than any individual family crying goodbye, or any one person's subjective experience of love, and just consider the nature of my job to begin with. I bought in, in some tired and pragmatic sense, to a fundamentally corrupt structure. Interject yourself into people's lives, at least for 22 hours a week, and pretend you've been given any direction or credential that can speak to their addictions, abuses, or otherwise neglect. Join up with the people saying, “We're helping!” in the face of everything they've never read about how our brains work, what environment these people are embedded in, or what's in store for them when we leave, or even as a country, as we ignore the roots of what contributes to their circumstances.

As a not idiot, I know I have to buy in somewhere. I know I'll die a measure of hypocrite. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to call it anything but hypocritical, even and especially when I may be due less admonishment than I'd reflexively give. What people don't want to believe, and this is how they are “rationally irrational,” is that you can criticize and try to change your corrupt structure while you're working inside of it. That's the extra responsibility. That's the “fight” I get into in writing emails and letters detailing very fixable things that nobody gives a fuck about fixing. I do. You're going to know I do. You're going to know the reason I dislike or can no longer work with you before I go. That's important. It's not just bitching and complaining. It's opening a door towards something better, and inviting people in, or providing yourself with the exact proper reason to move on and try somewhere else.

And how often can you do that? You have to structure your life in a way that attempts to force through behavior in service to the most important things. For all of the pain that it's taken, when I have my land inching along, nothing else makes more sense in the world to me. Every last gripe I've ever had about the nature of the tasks I've been subjected to, the long-term consequences of ignoring the difficult truths, and the potential to cultivate a kind of creative and removed environment is embodied with every killed weed, new structure, or dug hole. The greatest good I could ever as an individual bring to the world will come out of the ongoing work I do to make that land into an analogue for my mind. When what I hope to shape people with, that I never might do with my words becomes manifest, now they can be as taken with it as I've been taken by my experiences.

I've been feeling it more recently. The “comfort.” I get paid regularly now. I've gotten over my indignant stance on “normal” jobs. Well, not really, but I've adopted the same attitude towards it that I did during school. I'm not an idiot, it's either this or poverty or I'm likely just going to be watching TV because I don't have the money or help to move like I want to. I've lived the infinite downtime study life, the work every day mania, and my “normal” has resolved to some measure of over-doing something somewhere no matter what, so I might as well play bureaucrat, right? At least I might get health coverage for a year or so.

But what I became more aware of was the dimmer on that desperate drive and belief that I could do anything at any time. I was just as earnestly going to start a moving business as anything else. I could get the truck fixed and engine paid for right now. I'm not running out to do so as I still need power, a bathroom, a driveway, and now a consistent time I could even bother to do anything but sneak in TV and times to shit. It's so, so quick and easy, to get comfortable. It's the underlying backbone of the perpetuation of our species. People don't think twice about having kids or what they are really doing to themselves or the world by engaging in their job verses “the work.” Because, you don't have to. I could keep a kid alive in better circumstances than the places I drive these people to. I would want considerably more for my children than them simply being alive. I'm not an animal.

I think this blog speaks to my “spirituality” for want of a better term. I believe in the transcendent. I think there are truths and uses of information that are timeless and important and worth pursuing. I think you can be persuaded to live against all objectively obvious reason to creep over the double yellow line or plunge right into the lake. And I think I find my “god” in the embodiment and manifestation of the story only I can tell, the environment I can create, and the relationships that very much need me there to taste like me. I want to be so immersed that while I'm flipping through people like reddit links, I'm more me than I could ever talk about, and more me to other people than some empty prostration or matter-of-fact description pretending to have a handle on it all. I don't want to be stuck in the past, I want to transform and evolve it. I don't want my head on a pike for all my sins without climbing up to redo the hair or gloss up the lips.

As the faithful signs read on my drive out to the land, “Jesus is coming, ready or not. Heaven is Real” Well, rationally irrational monkey man, so am I. And the world I create will certainly feel more real than Heaven ever has. Just ask the increasingly long line of people who just wish I'd shut the fuck up.