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The premise of liberalism is a lie: liberation, equality, and freedom as innate rights.
Thus, we are constantly fighting off possible theft and violation of our rights. As such, we are all victims on the defensive against potential oppression.
The real irony is that it leads us, the always victims, to become oppressors.
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The more we narrate our life, the less we are enacting t: we turn to language to fantasize and reposition ourselves, and as life grows more complex and callously brutal, words become easier than life.
"Life will not be blathered into submission." ~ Ian McGuire
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“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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The brain struggles to make decisions. First, it asks, “What should I do?” and, with a lazy sleight-of-hand replaces ‘what’ with ‘when’: “When should I do this?”
This mechanism has been studied, but suffice it to say: if you ask the question your brain attempts to turn it into an imperative.
This is why what you ask yourself, what you fantasize about, is who you become. Simply by asking, and entertaining, your brain starts making it so.
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You might expect the tyranny of time to be it’s resolute march forward without empathy, yet it is our social mass adoption of it as a governing system that transforms it to brutality.
Time is not relentless or uncaring. Time is shared mass consensus, and so it is a reflection of ourselves.
You can ignore time, as some Amazonian tribes. Or, while you’re asleep it ceases to matter. But upon awakening in our society the time prison of the clock manifests devastatingly real effects.
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When it comes to experimentation, it historically is carried out by those on high, with the testing and results falling on those beneath.
The selection process follows two paths: 1) our compassionate empathy compels us to save you from your wretched self, or 2) your loyalty is rewarded by the uncountenanced opportunity to be raised up.
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Symbols (and ideology) are tools that help us grasp and manipulate reality, like a pair of pliers or a flywheel. When the tools (symbols) are widely adopted, we find a new means of heightened speed and control.
Once literacy became commonplace, we could communicate more rapidly, allowing influence and manipulation by broadcasting easily repeatable messages faster.
The converse of symbolic ubiquity and indoctrination would be “incremental learning” or “particular skills acquisition,” such as becoming a stonemason, rather than rapid, frictionless downloads, the process of incremental tutelage and physicality can buffer or bottleneck the transfer rate, providing ample time for redirective response.
The symbolic’s rapid and straightforward dispersal -with virtually no investment to gain the knowledge- is appealing, allowing them to reside in every portion of our life. Yet, we do not have good defenses (immunological reactions) against such speed and its potential harm.
(This is echoed in the physicality of a human’s strength versus the flywheel’s released kinetic energy or the hand against the exponential clamping force of the pliers.)
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the symbolic slips into artifice, illusion or camouflage.
These have the power to alter reality, but they cannot generate the reality they are drawn from: they are secondary manifestations.
Not being worn of reality they can never be it. They cannot be primary or foundational, but only ride upon and take advantage of the real.
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There are moments in which you are introducing somebody to your world. In these moments we often introduce a chronology, beginning early and moving forward to catch them up to the present. If that goes well, we project into the future.
These moments of reminiscence can be fond and annoying, a series of emotional justifications and prevarications from which our current place/moment becomes framed. If this framing is inaccurate, we are tainted; if the framing is excessive or exuberant, we become grandiose.
I shade towards subdued and humble, but just as often find those that shade grandiose attain the status they envision of themselves, which is to become the optimistic lie.
The cautionary note is to be neither humble nor a liar, and stretch for better without depreciation or inflation: you do not need to say it to become it.
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The Trojan Horse was a gift to the gods. It contained not just men as a surprise but, more profoundly, the death of men as a consequence of acceptance.
You could say accepting anything on behalf of the gods is to assume too much; it is to elevate yourself to an agency akin to the gods, which is to invite death.
For are not gods death itself upon contact?
Leaving the tool of death as men.
