Realpolitik

The other day my brother said,

“War’s not the answer, but neither is love.”

I think that is profoundly accurate.

For all intents and purposes, war is an option.

For all hopes and ideals, love is an option.

To live in the current reality of life, the combination of these, aggression and love, is paramount. However, the combination ends up looking like his statement: neither is an answer.

So what do we do to pursue the shadow of hope in realizing a better world?

I’ve convinced myself that education is one sort of answer, one that responds to the insufficiencies of love and hate. This sort of learning isn’t just the compilation of information or Truth, but rather the constant pursuit of a growing understanding of the world.

Learning information provides opportunity to learn Truth.

Learning Truth cultivates wisdom.

And wisdom avoids wars.

Learning of the humanity of others draws them closer.

Learning about the errancy of your tradition makes you hospitable.

Learning who you are, your own weaknesses and insecurities, makes you humble.

Learning how to serve helps you to lead.

Learning to lead allows you to serve.

After learning to avoid war, to draw others close, to be hospitable, to be humble, to lead and to serve, it is entirely practical to love others.

Strive to show others the importance of learning and perhaps they will learn to love you.

The Bastardization of Olympus: Sex and Sanctification

I read the synopsis for a book that declared that monogamy is unnatural for humans (along with controversial stances on many other things regarding what today’s society deems normal sexuality). Indeed, something to the effect of a small sex commune is closest to the State of Nature.

While I wouldn’t necessarily argue with the authors regarding how unnatural monogamy is, I would suggest that it is the noblest of choices.

The heights of human consciousness separate humanity from animals. The profundity of our self-awareness, reason and emotion distance us from our animal heritage. While we are still animals – we still have all of the basic drives that tie us to our roots – we stood up, thus separating us in a way paramount to the understanding of our existence.

Humanity needs significance in our lives in a way that no other species does. Ambition and the pursuit of meaning are a fundamental difference, one that forces us to reevaluate how close we really are to our ancestors. We have evolved too far to use the “basically animals” excuse any longer (lest you prefer to live outside of civilized society).

At this point, the MO of human life is the creation of significance.

Sacred essentially refers to something set apart, revered through distancing it from normal life, treating it in a way markedly different from the way other things are treated. In this sense, anything can be made sacred. To some extent, American culture has perfected the allotment of this sacredness, however arbitrary, which appears as the loss of anything sacred: with the pervasiveness of sanctity came the bastardization of worship.

Popular culture deified sex, alcohol, money, fame, power, etc. And through the placement of these things on our culture’s Olympus, all things holy have been adulterated.

To regress to our animalistic nature is to embrace this lack of significance.

To treat all things according to their utility runs counter to our yearning for import.

And while I appreciate practicality, I’m not so bold (or hopeless) as to say I seek no significant meaning.

I’ll find my girl, and marry her.

And I won’t convince my buds to swap wives when I get bored.

I’ll raise the act of love in a declaration of my distance from my primate predecessors.

I’ll celebrate the significance evolution has granted.

I’ll allow marriage to be sacred, and find deeper contentment in that than any number of lovers can give.

And anyway, the potential drama of polygamy is infinite--I can hardly handle one relationship at a time.

No thanks.

How I love being in love (and miss it dearly so)

Oh, love.

The tramp and maiden of prose and poetry,

a many-splendored thing,

our only need.

I think of the lyrics,
"how falling in love feels for the very first time,"

and it seems to me that each time ought to be considered a first

because each is so utterly different.

Sometimes it’s adventurous.

Sometimes it’s entirely reasonable.

Sometimes it’s indelible,

and other times fleeting.

Though while I think love is electric,
a brilliant and vivacious animal if ever there was one,
I think Love is essentially commitment.

And how.

It is the understood yet continually surprising showing up.

Love isn’t defined by the excitement to see the other

or thoughts of them floating in the forefront of your mind.

Love is when you know in your gut that,
for better or worse,
you won’t be the one to leave.

This Love is masochistic, sometimes.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

This Love is difficult, every time.

And that’s not to say all the time,

but when it’s tested,

when it’s challenged,

when it matters that it’s there,

it is a worthy trial.

These relationships are so interesting.

So personal.

Personalities all their own,

each as unique as I suppose they ought to be,

and each the offspring of two beings

each greater than their self,

yet transcended through the

lovechild of these selves, made whole: 

the love of two consciousnesses

is fertile,

and often begets one mind,

one heart,

one soul.

Oh, love.

I love love.

I love being in love.

And I don’t care what it does to me.

[y’know, to borrow from the Format]

Recalibrate Your Perspective: Perspectival Context and the Recalibration

On perspective:

Few would argue that they are unbiased, unless they extrapolate Kant’s universal reason to include perception in general.

In which case by “unbiased” I fear they mean “foolish.”

I am quite biased.

I attempt to approach the world from a realistic perspective. I tend to emphasize the reasonable, rational and practical. This is often contrasted with things like optimism, and is frequently confused with cynicism.

(I think naiveté lends itself to confusing realism with cynicism—considering reality to be better than it is, while certainly a noble mistake, holds that any non-optimist must be a cynic.)

I understand myself as realistic as a medium between how I perceive the perspectives of idealists on one side and cynics on the other.

I suppose that everyone needs to recalibrate his or her understanding of perspectives. After realizing that no one subscribes to a philosophy entirely (i.e. there are streaks of other philosophies in everyone’s perspective), you’ve got to establish what is what.

I don’t give people enough credit, but approach life practically, reasonably. Not enough credit isn’t enough to say cynic, though I certainly entertain a fair number of cynical musings.

Oftentimes it seems that anything not lining up with an idealist is cynicism, ergo they fancy themselves realists insomuch as they think that how they perceive reality is realistic.

Or they don’t understand the connection between reality and realistic.

That to demonstrate that perception of reality is relative.

I can only ever consider things through my two eyes.

I have no choice but to interpret reality in my own context and through my own experience. I strive to expand my context and experience in order to objectify my perception, but even my consideration of my own bias is a biased perspective on it.

I say I’m realistic, but some call me cynical.

That bothers me.

It bothers me because I am realistic.

They’re just naïve.

Trust me, I’ve got a corner on reality…

Recalibrate your Perspective: The Premises and Psychological Egoism

While it’s true that I don’t even kind of believe in a basic goodness of humanity, I don’t consider myself cynical.

That sounded awful—utterly depressive and any definition of vain.

Let’s establish the premises:

1) The foundation of human interaction is selfishness.

2) I can only ever see things through my two eyes.

On selfishness:

To begin, humans are animals. We are creatures of the animal kingdom down to our most basic instincts, namely survival. This drive to survive naturally starts at the individual and works its way out (stories of heroic sacrificing are special because of how unnatural or extraordinary the incidents are). We feed us and ours then move on to benefiting the community directly around us, formed for mutual security, which simultaneously improves our chance of survival. (I hope you enjoyed the summary of Hobbes’ social contract theory.)

From this initial formation of societies we have obviously progressed quite far.

We began the slow process of peaking Maslow’s hierarchy some time ago, seeking a god on our side.

(Some suggest this pursuit of a personal deity is on its way out for something presumably more transcendent, which will probably result in the deification of the self. This will lead to a societal devolution, from community to isolation, thereby starting the regression back to the state of nature in a functionally infinite cycle of progress and regress.)

Note that this holds that relationships are a product of psychological egoism. We trade friendship for friendship, the meeting of a psychological need, based on what pleases us. We are friends with people we find attractive, funny and interesting. Finding these positive characteristics in friends has fundamentally nothing to do with any benefit to them, and we’re not closest to those for whom we could be the most beneficial (if so, even that gives us a sense of importance and heroism or something—nothing is safe from selfish motivation). Mutual bettering, that iron-sharpens-iron business, is incidental to the formation of communities. It is a product of our ascending the old pyramid of decreasingly important things [read Maslow’s hierarchy of needs], a self-centered journey.

So, goodness needs to be redefined to leave room for psychological egoism: the quixotic, untainted ‘goodness’ of idealists does not exist save for wishful thinking.

Goodness exists.
It’s just not as Good.

None of this is negative, I should say.

It seems to me that it’s just the way it is.

And what’s more, it’s subconscious (insomuch as we aren’t aware of the most basic aspect of our motivations, not in the quasi-possession by a second self that we’re not aware of and that sometimes controls our minds, cf. Freud).

I’ll get to the perspectival context later.

Character-ing

I want to create a character’s identity so wholly that I cannot help but follow their responses through the situations in a story.

What does this say about me?

I thought of the whole “lack of confidence in my own identity so I create another” thing.

I don’t think that’s it.

But off that,

Is it possible to write a character outside of yourself? Outside of your own bias or perceptions of others? Outside of stereotypes?

Is character writing simply the recycling of memories and experiences of different people? Does that make each character less unique?

Is it possible to create a unique identity at all?

What does this inability to escape personal bias say about people?

I think your identity is largely defined through the delimitation of your interests and understandings through the reaction of social norms with personal experience. At some point, with self-reflection, you become aware of both the pull of social expectations and the pull of personal proclivities and can more objectively recognize the bias of the constructed self. In this less subjective consideration of your self you may consider the influence of your rearing, your bias, on your behavior. It is in a similar place that you might find yourself writing a character of whose bias you are aware, for which perhaps may be thus accounted.

In the end, your identity is a product of your context. So too is a character.
It just so happens that the character's context is a product of your mind.

Remember that story that helped you discover how you think?
Get to know the protagonist:
Get to know yourself.

Half-empty or Half-full?

Your perspective on the world is evinced in how you would end a story.
Or in how satisfied you are with the endings of other people's stories.

I would confidently extrapolate bold statements about a person’s understanding of the world based on whether or not the guy and girl ended up together, the underdogs won, or everyone died.

How you would end a story says everything about what is essential to your perspective of the world.
Is Sunday the “fit conclusion of an ill-spent week”
or the “fresh and brave beginning of a new one” (Walden 78)?
Is humanity basically evil or just faded Good?
Do people eventually disappoint or sometimes satisfy?
Is the glass half empty or half full?

Write a story.
Find out how you think.
Let me know so I can judge you.

Just kidding
...mostly.

There are friends and there are friends.

Friendships formed from a common past seem to have the “just show up” clause of a healthy marriage. There is a bond, an understanding that the relationship is and will be.

Maybe it’s Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s thought that "it’s the time you’ve wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

Or maybe it’s the appreciation of nostalgia.

Or the solidarity in identity.

Whatever it is, though, makes significance that much more significant.

A common context of your challenges and victories, joys and sorrows, and experience in general, can create harmony largely unmatched. A new companion can seem the oldest of friends if the right stories are told, and can be closer than a confidant in your heart.

Look, Ma! No Hands! And by “hands” I mean “reasonable explanation for any of my beliefs.”

Remember those rebellious twenty-somethings whose lifeblood is the rejection of their parent’s beliefs? Don’t worry about them, because after a few years of tried opinion in the crashing waves of real life, most of these young people will seek again the warm milk of their mother’s… tradition.

And even if they don’t, you can bet that they won’t be critically considering their thoughts.

Instead, these politically minded egotists will be watching Michael Moore documentaries or Fox News where they’re bottle fed partisanship with supportive (if not fanatical) formula, to be burped later around all their friends so they too can smell the stink. It is this regurgitation of the memorized, offensively biased “facts” on anyone who will stand their “brilliance” that gives them away. These self-appointed political savants incriminate themselves in the chastisement of the other side for being foolish, extreme, and ignorant. 

Unfortunately, for many of these political prodigies, utensils and potty training are a few too many insufferable years away.

Note that these people are careful throughout not to reflect on themselves—careful not to realize their own fanaticism. What would we do if it came to that, a world full of realistic people with an accurate self-image? 

“God save us from tolerance and deliver us to division.”

It seems we sit down and pray

“God save us from tolerance

and deliver us to division.”

Then turn our eyes to the stage of the nation

and glory in an answered prayer.

Interesting how accidentally capable we are

of answering our own prayers.

Or making them happen

one way or another.

Interesting too how evangelical Christians

and evangelical atheists

say the same thing,

just with different words.

They say,

“I’m right and you’re wrong.”

And sometimes follow up with,

“your words bounce off me and stick to you.”

The non-religious have realized

that religious people are close minded.

They have yet to realize,

though,

that an "open-minded" perspective

is a declaration in itself,

and sometimes,
inherent in that declaration,

is a closing of the mind.

It seems someone must be wrong

for someone to be right.

The Pitfalls of Tradition… and Learning… and Consciousness in General

People believe what they’re told, especially if you say it confidently.

Usually it helps if it’s written.

You believe me, don’t you?

Uncritical subscription to tradition has functionally prevented people from learning how to learn. Accepting philosophy, politics, and so on as a sort of matrilineal inheritance sounds ridiculous when stated, but is the reality of most people’s opinions. Even during the opinionatedly rebellious years of college, most perspectives are simply the reactions to [rejections of] parents’ beliefs.

It seems that learning for most is the process of memorizing responses to questions and commentaries on situations.

It is a matter of conditioning rather than a process of understanding.

I think most people would agree that this is not learning as it should be.

Those answers – the ones unquestioningly taught you in your Sunday school class, in dinner table conversations, and on slanted TV – are not answers at all.

They are the incarnation of bias.

The thought is a parasite. This parasite’s eggs, laid in your mind, hatch into larvae that creep through your heart and into your soul. After incubation, they spew forth from your mouth in a repulsive regurgitation of divisiveness.

...

An unrecognized courage, and maybe even faith, is required in the decision to reflect on your education, your tradition, or your life. To reconsider the very philosophy that has for so long delineated your identity is something deeper than a challenge. In fact, it’s impossible should you not commit, throwing yourself into the whirling cosmos of philosophical (and I suppose perspectival) pedantry. And all that in full daylight rather than coy consideration of righteous perversions of your tradition in the dark room of your bedtime brain, waiting to fall asleep and be freed from such discomfort.