Belly Button Lint

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Tag: reason

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    Superficial Control

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    1–2 minutes

    When faced with failures or setbacks, many people resort to superficial solutions rather than addressing core problems.

    They believe that polishing appearances, rebranding, or forcing perceptual changes will mask the fundamental lack of substance in their candidate, product, or ideology… or themself.

    It only follows that those who choose a symbolic/semantic argument would accuse critics of bias or persecution when they reject these surface-level changes. It is not only disingenuous—it’s a continual form of gaslighting that attempts to shift blame rather than confront real issues.

    Naturally, it is easier to shift appearance than reality, to control spin rather than actions, but this pursuit of superficial control reveals a core truth: that those who grasp and mold appearances are invested in the ephemeral, attempting to control what is inherently fleeting and easily displaced.

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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.

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    emotional triage

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    1–2 minutes

    External problems often require categorizing their quantity, quality, severity, or magnitude. We can perform triage to organize and prioritize by converting these logical abstractions into relative ranking.

    However, internally (psychologically and emotionally), we are incapable of logically ranking each predicament or distress: an argument with your boss or spouse is equally as influential on our decision being hungry. (see Daniel Kahneman)

    More importantly, we seldom recognize our emotional or psychological state, allowing it to creep into influencing our external evaluations (affecting our effects).

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    Proselytizing: Faith or Force?

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    1–2 minutes

    If you truly believe, do you attempt to convert others? Do you proselytize your truth?

    If truth is self-evident, there is no need: Your faith (your truth) will succeed on merit.

    However, if there is a kernel of doubt in your faith, you must overcompensate both in the number of people and their fervency. Only zealotry and sycophancy can quell the occasional contradiction and squeamish dissenters. Your faith will succeed on tyranny.

    Naturally, this simplification highlights the success of bad ideas and the failure of good ideas, but more importantly, is to consider the idea itself shifts over time to a new set of values carrying the faith but weaponizing it and deteriorating the founding principles.

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    The fickle nature of beliefs

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    1–2 minutes

    We pay to consume our beliefs.

    Yet, why do we need more confirmation and novel arguments or insights if we already believe? So we are prepared when the slidey sideways belief shifts its stance. When our belief bucks, we can rebut or run.

    Your beliefs: it’s like watching the weather and preparing yourself for the flash flood from the blue sky; not only is keeping a keen eye on the sky good for your social alignment, but you also catch your own party adrift.

    So, we pay not only for affirmation, but also for a really wonky weather gauge to protect us from our beliefs rogue waves.

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    relationship precrime: booby traps

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    1–2 minutes

    Many couples enact precrime condemnation.

    First, they create (make up) a sin that is an affront to their character, but keep it secret. Next, they goad the unwitting partner into crossing the invisible barrier: breach of character, breach of loyalty, breach of trust, a crime against one is a crime against us both, and you were guilty before you erred.

    Now, drama may unfold, which is revelatory: Will the partner submit or fight against artificial guilt? Consider that any argument is a form of communication, a bid for attention with heightened intensity and sharper edges. To engage is (win or lose) to affirm and secure the relationship; to disengage is to deny validity.

    To repeatedly trip emotional, relational IEDs is a sacrificial ritual to produce resentment through manufactured fault. We force a complicit role in undermining the self for the sake of the relationship, a codependent spiral.

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    God is dead is not far enough

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    1–2 minutes

    Slavoj Zizek says that declaring “God is dead” leaves standing the edifice of religion, our ideological faith in divinity itself. Because even with God dead, the Christian God can be revived. (If we only kill the idea, we know that the concept survives to be resurrected. How do you kill the concept?)

    Much more damming is to consider God is either evil or stupid. This means the route of destruction lies inside divinity, so the enactment of evil stupidity is immanent to the faith, bringing about its own corrosive implosion.

    The way to undermine faith is not to kill it (drown, outlaw, or silence it) but to point out its fundamental contradictions that align with our cultural bias: We hate nothing more than stupidity and will even claim that the root of evil is idiocy.

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    Failure of simplicity

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    1–2 minutes

    The only reason an idea takes hold is because it answers an emotional need. This is an instinctual recognition: the idea or message makes sense of the world in a way that aligns with your experience.

    This implies two things:

    1. The previous ideology and common sense messaging are no longer adequate.

    2. As the world progresses and grows more complex, we need more intricate and nuanced ways to interpret and process information.

    Yet, in the face of increasing complexity, the appeal of simplicity endures, hence the rise of conspiracy theories. These fantasies offer neat explanations (aliens, government cabals, Jews, a fake moon landing), but reconciling them with reality requires increasingly convoluted arguments, leading to shambolic constructions. Complexity, it seems, is inescapable.

    Historically, humanity’s progress has involved learning, moving beyond, and creating ever more complex systems to sustain ourselves and stave off boredom. Our simple pleasures require oddly sophisticated machines. As such, the most simplistic answer revert back to understanding human truths; classic myths which are never simple.

    Even access to these stories and information increases, meaning every response must account for more variables than ever before, necessitating more sophisticated tools for reduction and understanding to break through what we fail to see.

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    Political disgust as pleasure

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    1–2 minutes

    Political anxiety and disgust can transform into a source of enjoyment, where emotional investment—"libidinal investment"—eclipses rational thought. This emotionalism drives an addictive engagement with conflict, prioritizing outrage over reason because one derives "perverse" pleasure.
    from Slavoj Zizek
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    The Paradox of Safety: Life without risk

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    1–2 minutes

    We live in a time of state intervention aimed at eliminating harm—no violence, no risk—while socially taboo topics like body shaming, racism, and sexual shaming are culturally policed. Despite this pursuit of safety, anxiety and depression are at record highs, even as crime and violence are at historic lows.

    The paradox is to live in the least violent times, when beliefs have only emotional and social repercussions and seldom physical or property consequences, yet the fragility of people and failure to maintain peace is escalating.

    Part of this results in de-escalating objective, reality-based threats accomplishing an increase in symbolic, ideological concerns, which feel subjectively overwhelming and due to their shifting signifiers cannot be easily mitigated by individual effort. As we shift from physical to ideological harm, we -oddly- inhabit a space where safety is elusive and control pervasive.

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