Belly Button Lint

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Tag: confidence

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    victimization: oppression as privilege

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    1–2 minutes

    The Right embraces victimization as much as the Left, in part because it allows for idiocy to continue: you can’t criticize me while I’m oppressed (by you.)

    It’s obvious the Left reveres victims to the extent that they extend and create categories from which shelter from reality or logic is provided. (Because you are/were marginalized, all concessions should be made, we should all accommodate your hardship.) On the Right, tribal/national tradition and faith-over-facts create a populist shelter that regresses. (Because I am normal, I shouldn’t have to change, and am offended you suggest it.)

    The new reality then exists: you must be oppressed to be listened to and valued, leading to “oppression as social privilege.” Yet, the focused attention that grants preference is fickle, swayed by novelty, and so to retain attention victimization must escalate into the fantastical.


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    Motivation: The why

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    1–2 minutes

    Anyone, any team, can perform a task. But to do it well repeatedly, they must care, and that comes from belief.

    If the leader doesn’t believe in or effectively communicate the strategy, the project will fail, no matter how talented the people.

    You must know and believe your “why” to motivate and lead.

    from Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership

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    doubt and knowledge

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    1–2 minutes

    Accruing knowledge means at some point, you will encounter doubt (contradictory evidence). Doubt underlies all forms of curiosity and seeking, which is the admirable pursuit of a better understanding.
    Don’t mistake this journey as seeking "truth": it is more accurate to consider it a better means to piece together a survivable system in our current times.

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    doubt and faith

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    1–2 minutes

    Having faith beyond doubt is to stop seeking: perfect faith is perfect stagnation. Pure faith obliterates curiosity.

    You may still perform and struggle, but personal change will be incidental. The world may change through your performance, but only towards a singular, less considered state.

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    sceince as authority, not truth

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    Today, we can see science sociologically: rather than its function of falsification to increase comprehension and extend knowledge, its "casue and effect" mode of inquiry has been reversed upon it.

    The left insists you must "believe in science" with religious fervor lest you blaspheme, while the populist right over-indexes its fallibility in the face of corrupt practices and incentives. The most ironic for both sides is decrying science’s groupthink tendency.

    Today, science is politically used as "authority," not a process. Much as having a prophet as a mouthpiece, science is used to legitimize transfer away from the democratic into the technocratic: that is, sovereignty is moved away from individual debate into managerial expertise and handling. To invoke almighty science is to proclaim "truth" but from an inaccessible language backed by powerful corporate and academic institutions. Increasingly, this authority extends into everyday life, the better to manage us: Believe or be purged. Submit or be declared an "anti-science" idiot.

    idea from Matthew B. Crawford

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    humiliation reveals belief

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    1–2 minutes

    "Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged—what makes you feel truly diminished—and I will tell you what you believe, what you want to believe, about yourself."
    — Adam Phillips, psychlogist
    via Rob Henderson, Unmasking Malevolence

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    Pacifism in Context

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    1–2 minutes

    Pacifism claims a moral high ground, often overlooking the historical complexities of global conflict for idealistic humanism. While noble, this moral stance frequently proves futile, especially in the absence of opposing violent forces.*

    When an adversary is already contending with violence elsewhere, pacifism becomes a strategic position rather than a revolutionary one, allowing for negotiations and compromises with existing state powers that hold coercive authority. Thus, pacifism bows to violent powers to maintain an ethical stance.

    * examples of pacifism prevailing occur when violence on other fronts has decimated or threatened the existing power, meaning pacifism only works when violence is actively applied in some regard.

    from Ward Churchill

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    Incentives frame your outcome: surveillance data

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    1–2 minutes

    The questions we pose are driven by specific incentives: complex queries empower problem-solvers, commerce-driven inquiries explore market potential, but to foster awareness, we ponder the absence of problems.

    Surveillance capitalism, with its unsettling lexicon—harvesting, exhaust, extraction, akin to industrial strip mining—suggests that behaviors extracted are merely responses to the intrusive questions posed. Thus, the behaviors, and consequently the data, are manufactured at the moment of inquiry, not passively mined. This process is not a zero-sum game.

    The core issue with surveillance capitalism lies in its data collection focus, which is narrowly aimed at consumer profiling and sales rather than gathering data that could contribute to more meaningful or transformative outcomes: global ecology or meaningful biopolitics.

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    Noble, Romantic Irrationality

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    1–2 minutes

    Our cherished ideals—peace, love, nobility, altruism—are inherently romantic yet historically fraught with failure.

    Embracing these causes, despite their impracticality, has a romantic allure; we often find ourselves championing the losing side. This tendency towards romantic idealism is as irrational as it is compelling.

    Ironically, we place our hope in science as the savior from our own idealistic excesses, believing it will rectify the very failures bred by our romantic inclinations.

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    “you decide you”

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    1–2 minutes

    A new advertising billboard, presumably Spite (a Coca-Cola product), has reverted to text advice in black with large white text commanding "You decide you."

    While mimicking the style of Barbar Kruger and John Carpenter’s "They Live," where one dons spectacles to reveal the functioning ideological imperative, this advertisement sides with subjective authenticity.

    If "you decide you" -which is to make a self-determined choice- either you align with the advertising message, or it aligns with you, subverting your individuality back into obeying an external authority’s imperative.

    Your inverted rebellion now must be "don’t decide," or "decide for others." Both unpalatable. We must see beneath the aesthetic mechanism of capture and say "fuck it" to the therapized self-help and freedom lingo stolen and packaged to bind you to a brand: "just do it" or "think different" which prompts following instead of thinking or doing or deciding.