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We get caught up in extremes, arguing hyperbolic hypotheticals and slandering the middle road.
There is a fear of being labeled “lukewarm” or “hypocrite” for not going all the way: we seek purity in all positions and all ideologies.
The unfortunate irony of purity is isolation (manufacturing your own loneliness). Maintaining your position precludes change; this insight (purity is an isolating, alienating sickness) is required to embrace commonality, rationality, respect, or diversity.
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We love an inversion of common concepts: it feels like wisdom to flip understanding.
However this tendency is not always sagacious but instead formulaic, prompting a popular dismissal of the forthright as pedestrian.
inspired by: Goethe, “Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.”
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What if power is not written in stone but like media recorded, played, erased, re-recorded, rewritten repeatedly, and rehashed as nostalgic storylines?
Power, rather than written on high, appears amidst a kind of dumb, interactive exchange, where power occasionally dons the mask of symbolic order as needed: the “stability of power” makes a strong entrance when needed, but typically, higher truth is absent, letting the axiomatic rewrite us.
This underscores Fisher’s comments: With power, you only need to see it; you won’t read it. Capitalism is “profoundly illiterate:” “you play it, it plays you.”
Power is not uni-directional, but a mutual persuasion (you watch it, it writes you, you record over it). It does not need an ideological strategy to win you over but functions like a contagion upon contact, where you invite in repeatedly, aligning yourself to its process, over and over.
(idea from Mark Fisher)
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If you have godlike demands, your feelings of inferiority are ironically the result of them.
This means that if you didn’t feel entitled to anything, you wouldn’t feel as if you were somehow lesser than you are.
The paradox: expectations create your feelings, and your ambition creates lack.
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Relationship fights tend to get caught up in an “instance.” There are moments of disagreement; both sides pitch themself as rational, the other as hurtful or inconsiderate, and a list of details and grievances unfolds.
You can choose to make war, but the details are irrelevant. You could get past them in a second if… if something else more fundamental was repaired.
Someone (maybe both parties) doesn’t feel loved. What if you choose to love them so thoroughly that they stop acting out? Would loving them, instead of focusing on your pain, also heal you?
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When opinions change too often, a person is flighty, flakey, or capricious. They are often exciting and novel, chiming in when they should remain silent or neutral. Still, their fickle espousal reveals an irreverence towards truth and stability: they are not cautious or considerate.
However, the taciturn steadfastness of one who speaks little and never alters their belief is not trustworthy, though they can be dependable. Their similarity in response can be comforting but not a considered appraisal of information in an attempt at truth.
Both types of people -the flitting vacillator and the stoic ideologue- are intellectually dishonest yet may still appear as engaged in serious inquiry.
inspired by Nassim Taleb on X
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We tend to moderate justification, never going all out in either direction.
The calculus was done for us long ago: constraint and middling allow continued participation in a pluralistic, democratic group, which has more benefit than voicing (or enacting) aggressive justifications.
Yet, many people feign moderation and plurality is rampant with extremism, which infers that moderation is a disguise of the coward, the bully, the idiot, and the intelligent. The only true believer is the boring.
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One way to alleviate rumination is to focus on projects: go fix something.
One way to screw up a relationship is to fix it.
Applying “project management techniques” or “goal-based achievement” to relationships distracts us from our mutual humanity. That is, we are still avoiding our deep-seated problems by distracting ourselves, a.k.a. getting things done or being productive, which allows us to feel better for a moment.
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Thoughts have an amplifying power, reinforcing themself, until we believe.
However, once you recognize a thought as a transient, often false, assumption it loses its power to define you. (Belief/ideas dissolve upon investigation.)
The paradox is that we are who we think we are until we recognize the belief (ourself) as thought.
When we see “we” cease.
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One thing Buddhist masters figured out was that you cannot control the mind, thoughts, or emotions. However, people cannot give up trying, so you have to force the issue.
The first step is to tell somebody not to desire. After trying not to desire (to control desire) the student will say “I no longer desire.”
The teacher will point out, “you now desire not to desire.”
The paradox of control is to always end up within a larger process: You think you were having an “experience” but it is all experience. Your refined, increased control only proves your rigidity and what you cannot control.
The only way to teach this concept is not intellectual: you must speed up the eventual failure, which will -then- allow one to relax and see differently.
From from [[Alan Watts]]
