Belly Button Lint

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Tag: learning

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    Lies lead to exclusion

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    1–2 minutes

    "The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real." Nietzsche

    Definitions form the foundation of lies, giving rise to deceit.
    A definition provides a consensual meaning, while a lie deliberately distorts language to deceive for personal advantage, that is, to defraud for personal gain.

    It’s not the "act of lying" that wounds; society and people can endure deception. Yet the "act of harm" that results (a breakdown of trust and disruption of social capital) leads communities to ostracize liars.

    Intriguingly, professional liars dominate today’s landscape, forcing a tactical "loes-lose choice," where the allure of potential benefits allows a Faustian bargain; a begrudging, corrosive, temporary tolerance.

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    validation: self-scapegoating

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    1–2 minutes

    The nature of postmodernism is to decohere big things into fragmented things, or at least destabilize them enough to provide room for skeptical reconsideration.
    The outcome is atomized selves that have difficulty finding coherence. To stabilize this fragile self, people reach out to others to care about them, finding support through a validating network.

    Unfortunately, the ‘concern of others’ is a resource drawn from equally fragmented fellows. As you need care, they need care, and attention is an economic resource pulling concern to novel avenues, making your care network precarious.

    To re-engage your base your pleas must become more shrill or desperate, more excessive, prompting self-victimization as a means to gather attention, which feels like care.

    This descent inverts into ascent: self-scapegoating for living martyr status.

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    law over social pressure

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    1–2 minutes

    The two primary ways of societal control are law and social pressure.

    Social pressure functions as moral norms, restricting behavior by conformity or compliance for inclusion.

    Generally, norms are better for governance than laws, which must be parsed and ponderously enforced in cold, bureaucratic processes. However, public outcry can overcome sober traditions or common sense wisdom, shifting into hysterical punishment through exclusion and reputational attacks as mob mentality infects once sane citizens.

    This is when the law’s ponderous methodology performs its role: to slow down the fickle mob, doling out justice at a glacial pace.

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    To be free: pause remembering and cease imagining

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    1–2 minutes

    The past is mostly artificial, so when we continuously construct our “self” it is based on transfigured delusional remembrance.

    We then encounter each moment not as it is but from a “deluded self” reacting to a subjective narrativization, a private myth only tenuously touching on reality. This “self/ego” approaches interactions –either wounded or emboldened– attempting to correct our myth, to make the imagined real.

    Thus, we seldom pay attention to the present but busily imagine an improbable future from a distorted past, which traps us in quirks of our own making.

    If we can pause remembering and cease imagining, we could be free to see the present moment.

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    Knowledge vs. truth as failure

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    1–2 minutes

    – often, when we search for knowledge, we are searching for the truth, and when we search for the truth, some people are searching for certainty, the Karl Popper warns us seeking truth is a process of failures disproving our assumptions.

    In our quest for knowledge, we often seek truth, yet this search can morph into a pursuit of certainty for some.

    Karl Popper cautions against viewing "truth" as a straightforward path. He emphasizes that truth is inherently a process of iterative failures, where success lies in disproving our assumptions rather than confirming them.

    This perspective challenges the conventional notion of knowledge acquisition, urging us to embrace complexity and uncertainty as a process toward truth.

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    To be less-than-human

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    1–2 minutes

    Fascinatingly, having no extremes (rebellions) seems less-than-human.

    Being so ideally normalized that you exist without struggle or pathos is an automata parody of humanity, for there is no inner struggle, merely external alignment, a pastiche of the human condition, and yet precisely what many struggle towards. Bland contentment.

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    Stuckness

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    1–2 minutes

    You learn more from stripping the screw than from a straightforward extraction.

    When we can apply our theory or plan and things just work, we don’t really consider what we are doing. Yet when something breaks, reality intrudes, and your plans vanish, you have become stuck.

    The impulse is to get back on track, often with force or money.

    Only after pausing, dropping your plans, and re-encountering reality at its most fundamental aspect do you become open: you become unstuck, which allows us to solve the problem.

    from Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“

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    empathy conflated with approval

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    1–2 minutes

    In contemporary society, there’s a noticeable trend where people advocate passionately for various causes (and themselves), yet genuine empathy seems to have become entangled with the expectation of unquestioned approval: if you feel my pain or joy, you must approve.

    This manifests as the belief that they’re uncaring or antagonistic if someone doesn’t share your concerns.

    This is a classic manipulative splitting or binary polarization, which doesn’t allow the empathetic party to have their own point of view.

    The alternative is to offer sympathy and understanding without necessitating complete alignment (i.e., being able to dip in and out of empathy). This perspective involves acknowledging and respecting differing viewpoints while steadfastly upholding personal principles (boundaries). It embraces the capacity to care for others without necessarily endorsing every belief or action.

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    recreating aura in the age of replication

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    1–2 minutes

    Jean Baudrillard argues that replication and cloning represent the final stage of modeling the human body. From here on we begin to model “the model.”

    This is where we lose access to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the unique “aura” that gives something a nominal spirit and a sense of authenticity in the here and now.

    Once we reach this stage, similar to the mass-produced items discussed by Benjamin, the only way back to “authenticity” is through the creation of a manufactured historical nostalgia: we must artificially recreate aura.

    ~ From Mark Fisher

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    choking on media

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    1–2 minutes

    All forms of new media incorporate old media. (Marshal McLuhan) From the oral tradition to writing, movies, and the Internet, and now to algorithmic search engines that rank an index of personal preference.

    As more media is incorporated, the old is subsumed into the new form: theater may derive from oral tradition and writing, but you did not read or speak while watching it, and yet today, television is watched in tandem with streaming video gamers while talked over and casually reading closed captions.

    As media progresses from fixed entertainment into a distended flood from the index of self, all prioritized by rank, AI will increasingly mold the new media to the individual’s taste. This promotes a gothically incestuous spiraling inward, where algorithmic determination forms an ever-reducing, ever more specifically shallow taste loop.

    As the new form engulfs us and incorporates us, will content be choked out?