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Tag: perspective

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    Failure of Metaphor

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    1–2 minutes

    Standing tall often conjures images of strength: a solid, statuesque figure with a steely gaze is easy to look up to. And yet, locking your knees risks fainting: the vital juices stop circulating. Yet, the opposing view is equally ridiculous: what paranoid leader whips their eyes side to side, always ready to pounce or dodge, or is continually squatting and stretching to stay vitally attuned?

    Similarly, stone and steel shatter due to their rigidity, but we seldom comment on bamboo and wood rotting due to their porosity. The willow sways in gale-force winds, but no one builds lasting structures from it.

    The weakness of metaphor is its quick collapse when extended further, or opposed. Then we see it is only a tool of platitudes, a means to grasp a limited perspective, without direct speaking: a softer, narrative means to invoke imaginative correlation that must be conceptually, abstractly absorbed.

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    Freud’s Ego and the Narcissism of Kindness

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    1–2 minutes

    Freud saw pity, conscientiousness, and cleanliness as ego-driven narcissism—an inability to outgrow the Oedipus complex. Our obsessional neurosis, fixated on childhood perfection, halts maturity.

    Even kindness can mask cowardice, hiding behind humility instead of forging a unique path.

    This connects to Nietzsche’s slave morality, where empathy becomes a shield, not a strength. Over-obsessing, even in kindness, stunts self-becoming.

    The perspective shift is to embrace courage, confront the “self,” and carve an authentic identity, rather than clinging to infantile fantasies of perfection or discovering the innate self.

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    The Web of Influence

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    1–2 minutes

    Linear cause-and-effect thinking—pinning future strife on past grievances—oversimplifies reality. Influences weave forward and backward, social and personal; a dynamic interplay shaping existence.

    Our need for control/stability drives reductive rationalizations, but reality resists such simplicity, demanding holistic understanding amidst chaos, not merely guided by logic, faith, or “gut feel” but a blended amalgam of animalistic intuition and rational subservience.

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    self-becoming vs historical contingency

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    1–2 minutes

    Nietzsche and Heidegger converge in their view of the “self” as a non-essential, historically situated process that demands active engagement with a world lacking absolute foundations.

    Nietzsche calls for creative self-overcoming, Heidegger for authentic disclosure of Being, but both reject a static self in favor of agency and responsibility.

    Meanwhile, reading through Richard Rorty’s pragmatist lens, while insightful in highlighting contingency, flattens their philosophies by reducing the “self” to a linguistic artifact, a relativistic, interchangeable model, which ignores Nietzsche’s vitalism and Heidegger’s ontological depth.

    This reduction obscures the bold reimagining of the self as a dynamic, world-shaping force and reduces it to a mere redescription of terms.

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    Natural vs. Unnatural: The Slow Poison

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    1–2 minutes

    What does it mean to be slowly poisoned? To know your core is betrayed by how you’re treated, domesticated into cruelty through language and structures? We map reality with principles like justice and fairness, often innate since birth. Yet, societal pressures can cage us, twisting our essence. Is it natural to align with your truth or to become something else entirely? Freedom can feel like a cage if it’s controlled; equity can seem unfair if it’s forced. The insight is that authenticity resists domestication. The perspective is to seek liberty that honors your core, not a poisoned version of it.

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    survivor bias

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    1–2 minutes

    Often, we look at the survivors and make our decisions, but we forget about the casualties.

    The famous example is that the military put extra armor where planes were being shot, but they were only thinking of the returning planes (survivors as the dataset), not those that were shot down. They should have put additional armor on everywhere except where the bullet holes existed on returning planes: those areas signified lethal hits, as no aircraft returned.

    This “in your face” or “availability” bias is the same as when seatbelts or advanced military helmets are introduced: injuries go up, causing us to correlate the new technology with more injuries. However, this limited view does not consider that deaths decrease: an unseen factor.

    We are left confronted with the pain of the survivors, while neglecting the more significant implication: they are still alive.

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    Class prediction

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    1–2 minutes

    A few years ago, I recognized that identity politics fractures coalitions and communities rather than uniting them. I lamented the absence of "class" as a means to mobilize and recognize systemic inequality, subsumed as it was by more particular forms of justice.
    Recently, the left has reintroduced class and wealth inequality to rejuvenate broader support. Yet, today, the old rhetoric rings false: a back-footed retreat into propitious words from nimble mouths that will dance to any tune.

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    The trick in becoming

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    1–2 minutes

    We trick ourselves: addictions and ruminative obsessed distraction are often the tools that give us strength. They allow us to fantasize about an alternate self as we obliterate our current self, providing a space to rewrite our becoming.

    Our turn away from normal functioning and stable processing implies super-exception: we blame our self-destruction on our extreme sensitivity or superior intellect. We are special and cannot align with the world at hand, but we require regular escape and forgiveness for our uniqueness.

    In such a way, it is easy to lose oneself in our victimhood: our “space for becoming” (addiction, fantasy, rumination) becomes us, the deviant catastrophe who never accesses that imagined self we made space for.

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    The Apocalypse That Never Ends

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    1–2 minutes

    The world has ended—again. Every headline screams apocalypse, yet the truth is ongoing, and its direness is a matter of relative perspective.

    Yes, the past is lost, but this is not the end; it is change. History flows, and while crises are real, exaggerated doom is disingenuous and harmful to the real.

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    Parallax: Subject into object

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    1–2 minutes

    What if to be as subjective, individual human requires contradictory views?

    This means you have a parallax problem: to see the other perspective, you must switch your point of view. More troublesome is there is no way to see them both at the same time, meaning they cannot be true simultaneously for a single, logical position.

    And yet, to be human, we do this constantly: hold opposing contradictory positions as subjective truth.

    Even more complex, we want to be a fluctuating, active subject, not a fixed object. Yet, reason, truth, and rationality all tend to convert us towards objectness: static, one view, non-evolving, perhaps non-human.