Belly Button Lint

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Category: Culture

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    Games: Society Against Human Nature

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    1–2 minutes

    When we participate in games and sports, we become aware of our individual strengths and weaknesses. This helps us understand how to win and lose, which in turn aids in self-awareness and helps us determine our place in relationships with others. We learn how to function in a community of diverse talents and hardships.

    By playing against different teams over time, we engage in iterative learning, which provides us with a broader dataset for pattern recognition. This allows us to develop a broad foundation of strategies and choices that can help us maximize or exploit differences: cooperation or competition.

    Left to their own devices children devise their own games, standards, and strategies. A society that avoids games that allow winning or losing (to be converted and stigmatized as “winners” or “losers”) robs decision-making skills and future wisdom from their members.

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    Moral Flip: Idealism leads to Evil

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    1–2 minutes

    High moral principles reduce room for compromise. In fact, compromise itself is often seen as suspect.

    Inverse to our lauded praise for "moral steadfastness" its rigidity and idealism lead to evil.

    This happens when the desirable ends provide justification for violent and oppressive means. Or, you want good so much that you become bad.

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    Seriously foolishly good

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    1–2 minutes

    The shock of witnessing high craft with an element of absurdity is extraordinarily endearing and pleasurable.

    We crave the seriousness of mastery (slavish hours of discipline and excellence) to be thoroughly commingled with blustery foolishness. It recognizes the best of being human.

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    rhetoric of heroism

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    1–2 minutes

    “Wouldn’t you rather die on your feet, than serve on your knees?” This statement employs a type of vain morality that drives people into courageous self-sacrifice: killing themself for how others will see them. This is devoid of survival strategy and therefore (individually) quite stupid.

    And yet the idea (or image) of who we are is how we want to be seen, and it so profoundly affects our species that we can override survival.

    On one hand, we have the natural impulse to save our child, or any child, as the propagation of the species.
    On the other, you have a system that promotes brutal heroism and prods the shivering, shamed lonely into community sacrifice. This is not the loving mother, but a hijacked urge for approval from a missing father.

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    Sin as sublime

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    1–2 minutes

    Every deadly sin can become mystical at excessive levels.

    Transgressions at the extreme explode the individual: which is why they are a problem for community and society.

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    knowledge without illusions which negates everything they profess

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    1–2 minutes

    When you know you are right punishment is not rehabilatory, it is fate.

    If you know who you are, and what you love, then you know what you must do: there is no choice.

    Others may profess righteousness and attempt to drown you in punishment and exile, but this cannot be punishment since you knew the rules (accepted them) and (knowingly) accepted your fate.

    This is how Sisyphus can smile: he knows himself and the world without illusion.

    “He achieves a knowledge without illusions which negates everything they profess.” ~ Albert Camus.

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    We don’t need new ideas

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    1–2 minutes

    The problem is not coming up with new ideas: there are already millions of ideas (since the dawn of time) from practical to insane that we don’t use or use horribly.

    The issue for mankind is not being creative or novel, though it feels great, but rather parsing through these old ideas and staying the course.

    To simplify: discipline is more valuable than creativity today.

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    The self: unreliable ghost vs synthetic process

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    1–2 minutes

    There is a persistent looping regress, where we look to outward sources for reality (stable facts, empiricism) but find reality shaped by our own experience (phenomenology).

    More confounding, we cannot find “the reality of the self” inside us when we look. It simply appears and acts, obeying neither reason nor ideology nor religion.

    No wonder we abstracted ourselves by dividing the soul from reason. We need something besides the “invisible self” to lean upon; a synthetic process (an imminent transcendental abstraction) is preferred to an unreliable ghost.

    Like the soul, we see very little reason and rationality, yet we feel that we use it and are stabilized by it. It can chain narratives together into comprehensible shapes, but it fails to fully tell us who we are: even using reason, we cannot pinpoint or control the elusive self.

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    Two reactions to Precarity: optimization and vitalism

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    1–2 minutes

    One reaction to the precarity is to return to the body, eschew ecstasy and escapism, get more sleep, optimize your schedule, and stabilize your relationships. This bodily discipline manifests targeted outcomes, and with goal attainment, it swells self-assurance which imbues a sense of control: mastery over your life.

    The problem is, it takes cybernetic and Taylorism principles (that is machine orientation) and applies them to the human, creating a series of autistic self-soothing mechanisms that produce a reduced harder, hollower self.

    Another reaction is the vitalist, who returns to nature by reanimating their animal spirit. It’s esoteric emotive entrancement provides an independent, esoteric mastery, highly romantic and ephemeral, but leaves little room for readmission to civilization.

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    rejected masculinity

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    1–2 minutes

    Many boys were taught masculinity by standing up for themselves and confronting the world’s difficulties: don’t complain, do.

    Today, as a man, you still don’t complain. But you are told to back down, apologize, and shut up: step aside.

    Many women see this as an apropos reversal: men being treated as women were treated.

    The reaction from men will be the same as that from women, except perhaps less social and more violent. Feeling alienated and incapable of providing value or worth, men form sub-societies and lean into the traits society was meant to civilize.

    How does “don’t complain, do” manifest for a man stripped of socialized, compassionate consideration?