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When you give advice, don’t forget that the person you are talking to already knows the right thing to do.
They may change their outlook if you offer them a new perspective, but that misses the point: any meaningful struggle is beyond right/wrong and stems from a core contradiction of being human.
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Our most significant flaw is binary thinking: winner-loser, zero-one, black-white. Binary categorization makes separateness and opposition fundamental.
In reality, the world is highly relationally contingent. There are no objects or fixity so much as processes over time.
The environment evokes action from an organism, yet we attribute the move as coming from the individual, using it to describe them. Yet, there is no individual without the environment and no action without interactive (shared) evocation.
~ Alan Watts
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We are creatures evolved from dirt, mere flawed organisms until our status is threatened, and then our ego angrily declares our self-importance.
We claim to do the work for money, except when we slip up or care too much, then it is all for others or for soul sustenance. We claim to be the romantic rogue and become the cutthroat mercenary with the next breath.
It is as if we don’t know and are frantically bouncing ideas off reality to see which one it will accept. We do anything to keep from looking within and either knowing or declaring we don’t know.
We consistently avoid honesty at all points.
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If you live for other people’s approval (i.e., the need to be liked), you must always submit to them, making you detestable.
This unlikeable “contingent self” is the paradox of seeking external validation, which of course, we all need.
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To maintain submission, you must rewrite history.
Even this will not quail dissent when contradictions and hypocrisy multiply, yet a story with no alternative constricts the imagination, choking out possibilities in favor of momentum.
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There is a part of you that is reckless. It works to destroy you under the pretense of fully living.
This paradox is temporary, because it is a feeling: it is the small you lashing out, not the greater you already connected to life.
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It seems apparent that we should turn from detrimental chaos and return to accountability, responsibility, and transparent governance structures.
Yet, on a personal level, to become responsible is difficult because we enjoy our "freedom": freedom defined as a release from obligation.
On a societal level, to turn away from nonsense appears limited to capitalist or bureaucratic "logic": logic defined by economics and institutions.
These challenges are due to a carefully nurtured naivety, a soft spot for nonsense.
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Continued contradictions become nonsense: illogical, irrational closed systems perpetuated by mass-concensus, dogma, and momentum. The danger of engaging, even to critique, is to become corrupted (contradictory) yourself.
To avoid corruption, we must return to bottom-up rationality instead of top-down nonsense.
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Frustration at contradictions is an alert: the system is not serving us.
For instance: we have starvation amidst abundance. We are more connected than ever, yet people feel more alone and despondent.
When a system’s goals are out of alignment, either the stated goals are lies, or the system is not built to accept adaptive feedback.
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After reading a social media article you agree with, studies show that it further polarizes you into your prior beliefs if offered the opposite point of view. The opposing extreme is too foreign and alien to draw you to the middle.
When you’re shooting for a target you do not aim for the edges (polarized views); you aim for the center. If you want the conversion to a thoughtful reality, aim for the center instead of radical evangelism.
