I was told of a man who came before, before the ashes settled the score and right, wrong, and justice were sent into the scattered winds of time. His footsteps trudged through mires of greed left by those who’d stuffed the seeds of life and joy into their back pockets and gorged upon his dreams. His face was sunken, his cheeks hollow, yet his eyes burned and saw tomorrow as lying just beyond the reach of the sycophants within. A step, another, and then his feet struck a bundle of rags on that deserted street and sent him sprawling into the ashes beginning to cover the ground. The rags rose, a shape formed, an old man he was, kicked beaten and scorned, but he had the last laugh, for his tormentors had destroyed themselves with sin. “My son," he said, “can’t you tell, this place don’t seem to be doing so well, and heaven’s a long, long way from hell, so sit awhile with me?” The first words the traveler had heard since the disintegration of his world drew him like an old forgotten spell to the ground by that old man’s side. “Friend,” said the old man, with deep sigh, “nothing can break the wall so high that lies between this festering place and the beauty you wish to see. “So what moves you, in this sorry state, towards a certain and everlasting fate, a permanent end, forever forgotten by a place you’ve never known?” “Sir,” the man replied with a faint smile, “my answer’s been the same for a while, even when the grass was green and the oceans crystal blue. “This world isn’t mine and never was, it moves in patterns without cause, and through times of joy and sorrow alike has borne me ceaselessly on.” The old man stirred, scratched his head and said, “Well, tell me this instead: if the world cares not for your volition why do you move at all? “A single man against the weight of time can do no more than stretch the rhyme, the lie of his motion being his free will, the folly of his freedom. “So begone with all the false delusion! Make your stand against this confusion! Sit down, choose not to put yourself at the mercy of the waves! “Choose not to roll the cosmic dice! Choose not to sort through virtue and vice! Opt out of the cycle that’s trapped you inside! For god’s sake, don’t move forward!” The old man shuddered, his energy spent, he doubled over, his knees bent, as the traveler lowered him gently down to rest upon the ground. “I’ve spent a life of bowing down to a world hell bent on keeping me there. I’m tired, son, don’t forsake me before you tell me why you move.” “Old man, there’s an altar, a shrine hidden deep, invisible, though I saw it once in sleep as a towering castle, a wintry fortress of iron and brick and stone. “It stands eternal, the ashes fail its weathered battlements to assail. It is there I shelter my weary soul as my feet move ever forward. “That place is me, it always was, it’ll fall when ashes run their course and my body returns into the Dust from which it did emerge. “I play the game because I must, but I refuse to bow to greed, to lust, the vile whisperings of a world perched on the edge of the abyss. “I’ll live and die on my own terms, not rotting, eaten by the worms. For what will be will always be, and heaven’s a pleasant dream.” He rose, then, and said farewell, what became of either, none can tell. Of their voices, mere echoes remain carved on a broken city pavement. The ashes came after the fire, and a world grew anew, untouched by desire, and somewhere in a verdant field the footsteps stopped at last.
Manual 1.0: The Bedrock
Note: This is not really a standard blog post, it’s more a set of thoughts and self-questioning organized into a more cohesive whole. I may end up changing and working through most of this. If you do decide to read this, I hope you enjoy it!
Confusion is our natural state of existence. We’re dropped into a video game called life and given no instructions, no manual. So we make up our own manuals, and we try to convince others that we’ve found the true path to a good life. “We” can be a person, a government, a religion, a cult, a family, a tradition or all of the above – the common thread is the prescription of an ideal way of living life.
I see no reason to believe any of these manuals will ever stumble upon an answer we can all agree upon, much less a true comprehension of the universe. Millennia of recorded history have done nothing but prove that outside of a few basic certainties, everyone will never be able to agree on anything. Humans being social animals, living in a world of humans means accepting this fact.
Yet my own experience has shown me that most of us (though I can only truly speak for myself) crave a sense of certainty. Sartre said we all have a god-shaped hole inside us, but I’d characterize it more as a need for a compass to guide us across an endless sea.
In this confusing tumultuous landscape we all find ourselves in, perhaps it is important to go back to the one anchor we have: the things which are certain and self-evident, however few and far between they might be. Maybe it is possible to create a template for a good life out of this?
I’ll enumerate 4 relevant certainties here:
- All of us will come to an end someday. Outside of suicide, there is no way of knowing for certain what that day will be.
- We cannot control everything that happens to us. We will be the target of actions and events that we could not forsee nor prevent. Nature inflicts these by chance and patterns, institutions by inertia and structural blindness, other humans by their own confusion. During the time we have before our end, we are hence at the mercy of a permanently uncertain future.
- The only control we certainly have is our own actions in the present. As we can’t control the future through our actions (see above), we can’t hope to morally structure our actions on the expectation of what they will bring in the future, because that future is out of our hands. We can only control what we can do right now within the constraints imposed by the situation we find ourselves in.
- Rational humans will never universally agree on any value judgment. I base this certainty on the historical precedent I mentioned before, as well as upon the fact that opposing ideologies and value systems can arise (and have arisen) from reason due to differing perceptions. Even rational adherents of the same ideologies, beliefs, and values have and will always find specifics and implications to disagree upon, at least at the group level. This implies that, assuming you don’t believe in one single superior god with a set of universal value judgments, it is impossible to consider any value judgment as more or less objectively valid than another, simply because there exists no ethical instrument besides humans that can create value systems.
These certainties do help derive certain principles and guidelines for action within our own lives. However, they don’t dictate what value systems to follow, but rather how to follow your value system well with regard to yourself and others:
- If we’re judging the morality of our actions, it has to be based on the means, not the ends. This is because of the uncertain future meaning that any “well-intentioned” action (focusing on an end goal) can end up in completely unpredictable consequences, and hence such actions focused on “good” ends can’t be considered moral if their means don’t align with our value judgements. In addition, the possibility of death and hence never being able to fulfill our ends necessitate present means as the only way to be moral.
- The circumstances we find ourselves in do not matter – all that matters is what we do within these circumstances. Since the past and future are out of our hands, it makes no sense to question the morality of, or to aim our actions against, the “constraints imposed by the situation we find ourselves in (certainty 3.).” This situation wasn’t of our making and will never be, it was the product of a series of interconnected decisions. It’s easy to reconcile this with nature and institutions, but what about the decisions of other humans? My answer to this is: if circumstances are imposed on us by the actions of another person, it is the product of their value judgments in their own circumstances. Since we cannot determine whether their value judgement is more or less correct than our own (by certainty 4) and whether they had any control of their circumstances that caused them to make this value judgement (by certainty 2), trying to rectify the circumstances we find ourselves in by means of attacking the people who created these circumstances is futile.
- Belief or faith in any value system cannot be unreserved. While this is almost self-evident for atheists or agnostics, it also applies for the rationally religious. If an omniscient and omnipotent God has rendered it impossible to convert every single human to their worship, perhaps the intention was to learn from the value judgments of heathens? No harm trying to court the religious I suppose.
- It is not rational to either dictate or be dictated a value system. To dictate a value system is to ignore another’s experiences and circumstances and to ignore the impossibility of your value system being superior – the inverse also applies. However, this does not mean that we can’t learn from the value systems of each other and apply them to our own circumstances.
TL;DR: in our day to day life, if we live by certainty, the value systems we choose for ourselves should guide our present actions towards good in whatever present situation we find ourselves in, and we should be both skeptical and open to the value systems of ourselves and others.
This isn’t a cohesive way of living life by any means – as I said at the start, there really isn’t any that I can expect to apply as certainty to everyone. But maybe keeping these principles in mind can help us lead our day to day lives with a little more tolerance and peace? The only way to find that out is to try.
However, I do have more to say (I apologize in advance) about how this affects an outlook on the world as a whole, but that moves away from certainty and towards some more shaky logical territory, so I’ll save that for another post. If anyone did read through all this, I’d love to hear what you think about it!
The View from Halfway Up
Every day that passes, I get a little bit older. I get a little older and laugh a little at the person I used to be. The laughs start hesitant and self-conscious at recent scars and failures, yet lose all inhibition as I wander backward into the things I can no longer judge myself for, for beyond that blurry line is a person that is no longer me.
Importance waxes and wanes, with every passing day. Priorities shift like clouds, sunlight streaming through the gaps to reveal something…obvious? Obvious to me now, obvious to a person who is no longer blissfully ignorant and blinded by innocence.
Is this what they call maturity? These laughs at the past aren’t as clean and pure as I thought they’d be. There’s a bitter aftertaste to them, a resentful twinge, a cringe at each successive oversight, fading in intensity as years recede.
Why then do I feel nostalgia, why does anyone? Why do we implicitly want to make the same mistakes again? Because the nostalgia I feel isn’t to make the past “right” through what I now know – that erases the person I am today, and that’s something I can’t stomach. No, my nostalgia urges me to erase my knowledge of my own folly, to relive each error as I was.
This peculiar masochism of nostalgia has shown me that maturity and wisdom are far, far apart, and if by some miracle I make it to the former I have a long way to go before I reach the latter. If this is what they call maturity, it is no blessing. It is a burden of caveats and checklists and lessons and signs that we must always keep in mind to avoid falling for the same traps and tricks again. And though I can’t speak for everyone, I think that our nostalgia for innocence is our nostalgia for a world not confined by the red tape we’ve imposed on our eyes.
This quasi-maturity I (maybe arrogantly) think I possess has stranded me less-than-halfway up a mountain. At the top is wisdom, and at the bottom is innocence. The choice I must make, and that I think we all must make, is whether to try and make the summit, or to backtrack down the slope. To persist in trying to learn lessons and apply them to our lives, or to simply give up the red tape and live every day as a new book, rather than a new chapter.
If there’s a right answer, I haven’t found it. I can’t give any reader or myself any certainty or reassurance, though I wish I could. The choice is your own and it is my own, and the right to decide the path from halfway up is inviolable.
But there is one thing I can tell you while suspended on that mountainside, looking down at my life of 18 years and looking up towards a peak I can’t quite see.
The view from up here is incredible.
Straightjackets Pt.1
There exists a long, unwritten, unspoken list that governs all of us, in every interaction we have outside of our close friends. It is a list of things we cannot say – Political Correctness, in other terms. To speak these words or phrases is a death sentence in the court of public opinion. This list is well-intentioned – after all, what it contains is offensive, highly so, and can be seen as representing ideas antithetical to what our modern society stands for.
But there exists a little thing in liberal democracies called freedom of speech, a foundational basis for most other freedoms. How can a desire not to be offended trump a fundamental right? I see no “freedom from offense” in any democratic constitution – the only places where freedom from offense exists is as a dictum in authoritarian systems to minimize and silence opposition (China is a case in point).
Yet the freedom from offense is inviolable to its defenders. They see themselves not as authoritarian, but rather as champions of the rights of minorities, and warriors against a language intended to preserve an unequal system.
I do not deny the ability of language to oppress. It is a frightening projection of power. But let me ask you, reader, a simple question. If you wanted to stab me, for whatever reason, would I benefit from you keeping that intention a secret and alluding to it cryptically every now and again, building up vitriol until it explodes? Or would I rather have you openly say “I want to murder you,” and then we figure out why?
This might seem absurd, but it gets to the root of the problem. To tell a racist to avoid derogatory slurs does not cure his racism. It leaves it to fester even more, in silent resentment. And when it manifests itself, how can we be surprised? There was no dialogue, no language he could use to express the offensive ideals in which he believes and which we find abhorrent. How is he to understand his errors when he can’t express them?
And this is just talking about the average person. When we look at systematic discrimination, whether against the poor or any racial/ethnic/LGBTQ/etc. minority, those in charge don’t bother with saying derogatory things. They just put their views into action, with devastating consequence.
But political correctness isn’t just non-effective. It aids the cause of the oppressor. Have you noticed that there are no longer “racists” in America? The problem is systematic and institutional, yet no single person in any American system or institution will say, as Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens openly and despicably stated in 1861: ” the negro is not equal to the white man”. What has changed since then?
What has changed is that those who wish to enact their racist or discriminatory doctrines can now hide behind pseudonyms and cryptic allusions. Political correctness gives them a tool to obscure what they’re actually trying to do. To borrow from Carlin (link at the bottom), the poor/minorities no longer live in slums or ghettos in America – they “occupy substandard housing in the inner cities.” In our context, law enforcement isn’t anti-black, it’s “prioritizing the preservation of law and order.” Take a vile intention and hide it under layers of cold clinical jargon and it’s not vile anymore! It’s clean, ambiguous, inoffensive, and it flies over our heads.
And the worst part, the scariest part of all of this, is that when we are enforcing this list of things we can’t say, we’ve fallen for the trap. We’re fighting the words people say rather than the manifestations of their faults. We’ve been baited into alienating potential allies in the fight against cruel inhumanity.
So when someone is lambasted and told to be silenced for using words and phrases from that terrible list, I say: let them speak! Let them shout their opinions for all to hear and see what they truly are, for the truth of their intentions to be loud and crystal clear. If they are willing to talk, we can talk, and convince them of their errors, and understand just what drives ordinary people to grotesque views of the world.
But if they are not willing to talk, at least we can see that knife well before it strikes.
Note: I’m not quite done with expressing what I feel about political correctness, its role in humor and comedy is significant enough to warrant its own separate piece: Straightjackets Pt.2 (Coming Soon :))
Link to the George Carlin Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
To Cleanse a Sin
Disclaimer: I’m an Indian-origin American-Citizen Couch Potato, and therefore I understand that my opinions may be out of whack. This is my two cents on what I see unfolding across the United States.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” John F. Kennedy uttered these words upwards of six decades ago, in a time where African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities proclaimed they had had enough with a system openly intended to keep them down. Six decades ago. Three of my lifetimes ago.
Systematic Institutional Racism needs no introduction by now, especially not from someone like me. I do hope most of us have been trying to understand just how cruel and dehumanizing it is to live under an invisible yoke, as much as is possible for us who have blindly profited from the exploitation of the disadvantaged. Watching the protests unfold across the United States from India I can do nothing more than educate myself and pin my hopes on the bravery of those protesting for the simple right to equality.
But as I watch the news media (right and left) cover the situation, I’m struck by how easily they disavow rioting and violence among pro-BLM protesters. Words like “unequivocally condemn” and “absolutely disgraceful” are thrown around like statements of fact. It’s counterproductive, they say, marring the largely peaceful protests occurring across the world, and the breakdown of law and order must be prevented.
Counterproductive? When armed mobs stormed government buildings in defiance of federal COVID-19 quarantine, it seemed to help their case if nothing else.
Marring peaceful protests? The stereotype of African American rioters is already peddled so widely by the mainstream media that there is almost nothing a peaceful protester can do to avoid being branded a public menace.
The breakdown of law and order? To that I say, for god’s sake how far can an unjust system of justice remain unchallenged?
Six decades after the Civil Rights Movement, President Kennedy’s words have proven prophetic. Peace has been responded to with violence. Wearing a hoodie or running away means your death is an acceptable casualty to society. It is no longer acceptable for the oppressed to ask for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They must beg for the right to breathe.
It is easy for me to sit here, safe in a privileged lifestyle, and say these things. I am well aware of that fact. Regardless, you will find no condemnation of any rioting or violent acts of pro-blm protesters here. There comes a point where turning the other cheek leads to being shot with rubber bullets and tear gas and flashbangs and pepper spray, and at that point nobody can blame you for fighting back.
The United States was founded with a grand dream and an original sin, the sin of slavery and oppression. If the institutions that enforce this sin today cannot openly and rapidly change course to absolve themselves of it, there will come a time when they will reap what they have sown.
Hey You!
What is it about the absence within myself that seeks self-destruction? After all, the destruction of absence is filling the space it occupies, and in my case emptiness is destroyed by contentment, by a feeling of fullness. I fluctuate from contentment to emptiness in no discernible pattern, thrown from one end of the spectrum to the other by the whims of an episode on TV or a beautiful sunset. But it’s only in my moments of emptiness that I want to create things that can connect with others, and I can’t help wondering where on earth this dissonant tendency comes from.
Maybe a good place to start answering that question is with the other side of the coin – why don’t I want to create when I’m content? Frankly, I can’t identify with the stereotypical trends of social media, of sharing normal happy moments to project a normal happy version of myself. I mean, I think I understand why others may want to, but I don’t really feel any special desire to share my moments of happiness with everyone. This blog is really the only public place my thoughts are ever published, and while I share my thoughts and experiences of contentment with friends, I’ve never felt the need to do so here.
I suppose there’s a simple reason for that – when I’m content, I’m content. What I mean by that is, if something makes me content, I feel happy and comfortable as I am by definition, enjoying the happiness I derive from it within the confines of my own head. What benefit would I get from sharing it with everyone else? Of course, there is the reason of transferring that happiness to others; but if my first time cooking made me happy, I’m happy sharing it with a few people I know would be happy hearing about it (friends and family). I have no way if doing that on a public forum will really positively affect anyone. So, I’m happy being happy, and creation ceases.
Why, then, do I want to create when I feel empty? The inverse of the above seems to be the obvious answer. If you’re content when you’re content, you’re discontent when you’re discontent. In essence, as with contentment, you definitionally have an urge to change your state of affairs. And hence you create or connect and try to find something to fill the void until you’re content again, with your actions tending towards an equilibrium of contentment.
It’s intuitively simple enough, but it asks the question: why do I then want to share my thoughts and emotions about that period of emptiness? Most of my writing and poetry are about, to put it bluntly, “sad” things, or thoughts I have when I’m confused and empty. If emptiness just drives me to create, why do I keep creating in emptiness’ image? I see two possible reasons for it: either it’s just a natural characteristic of the need to create that emptiness causes, or it’s a choice I’m making.
If we consider the former reason, trying to prove a natural characteristic of something is inherently problematic, because it follows that exceptions to this characteristic are unnatural. This blog is a case in point. While the vast majority of my writing happened when I was feeling empty, some of it isn’t about emptiness. My poem about the Campo de Fiori, for instance, or the essay about zygites, were written when I was sad, but they’re about fundamentally beautiful, uplifting, and meaningful things, at least to me, and they made me feel less empty.
This chain of reasoning kind of supports the second reason – that the decision is a choice – by furnishing me with a convenient justification. I choose whatever has the best chance of filling the absence as and when I create. The subject is irrelevant, so long as it fulfils its purpose of destroying the absence. But then, as has become a pattern, another question crawls out of the woodwork (you’re welcome, reader). And this question is less general and more specific to me – why is it that, most of the time, I feel less empty when I try to share my emptiness with others?
Just like the other questions I’ve asked so far, I could try to put forward a few logical reasons and debate which one is best, but that would be disingenuous. Deep down, I think the reason why I want to share my emptiness with others is because… emptiness is lonely. When I’m content, I’m also content being alone in my contentment, excluding any person who helps me feel happy. But emptiness is also the lack of contact or connection, an existence in a blank void. And, as absurd as it is, I try to reach out into this void for someone else out here.
I feel like if I find a fellow castaway, since I’m stuck in my absence until the caprice of my mood throws me a bone, the emptiness might feel less empty for a while. And so I create facsimiles of what I feel and throw it into a jumble of words and put it out on my blog and hope. But I don’t hope to feel better myself, at least not directly. At best, I’ll get a like or a couple views, and maybe a few kind words of feedback from my friends (shoutout to meme lady, you rock!). But otherwise, I can’t hear any response, and so this blog can’t make me feel less alone in my emptiness. Rather, I hope someone else comes across it and that it makes them feel less alone. I shout into the void and I hope someone hears me and feels a bit better, even though I can’t hear them. I hope they can read things that I write, and that it drives them to think or create or do something to make themselves feel happy or alive. And I guess it’s the possibility that things I write and create, things that paint a picture of my own moments of emptiness, can make others feel less alone that makes me feel more complete.
Maybe I’m being hypocritical here. After all, I said not too long ago in this post that the lack of certainty of my positive moments affecting anyone was a good reason for not sharing them: shouldn’t that apply here? Risk is becoming a theme on this blog, and now it rears its ugly head to help me weasel out of this contradiction. Emptiness is discontent and desperation, and desperation isn’t keen on risk aversion – the emptier I feel, the more I’m willing to take the risk of reaching out and not being heard on the off-chance that someone does hear me.
And so, way-too-patient reader, we reach the end of my meandering questions and attempts at answers. If you’re reading this and you’ve read/are going to read other posts on this blog, this is where a lot of it comes from and this is my aspiration. It feels weird to put it so concretely here, but if I’m going to be honest about my thoughts, I should have to level with you about my motivation for expressing them, long-winded as it is. Of course, annoying old me can’t help but sneak in one last question – if emptiness can be a source of creation, is there any value in contentment besides selfishness? I’ll restrain myself here (you’re welcome again) and try and answer this in some post somewhere down the line. As for now, it’s time to shout out into the void again. Hope you’re out there.
A Ramble
Ramble on, life. I’ve been listening. I’ve been listening too closely to the things I wish were right. Or maybe they are right. I don’t know, I’m so darn confused, I hope everyone else is as confused as me. The voice of life echoes and I don’t know if it’s because I’m in a packed auditorium or an empty room. Some part of me hopes it’s the former. I’m not unique, I’m just another spectator, pulled along from act to act. The same curtain falls for everyone.
In the empty room, it’s just me. Sitting. Alone. Why is that better, being unique? If you’re really unique then how can anyone relate to you? If they can’t relate to you, you’re alone. What are my experiences? Are they a patchwork quilt of experiences someone has had at some point in the past, or are they a wholly new and unique flavour of life that only I can taste? Either way, the bottom line is I’m alone, either in an unfeeling crowd or an empty room.
Does that mean we’re all alone? No, it doesn’t. Some people don’t feel alone in a crowd, ditto for empty rooms. Hell, I like empty rooms most of the time. Unique or ubiquitous, you can choose to believe that other people feel what you feel or you can choose to feel like nobody can ever understand you. There’s no way of knowing for sure, is there? It’s a blank canvas.
But for heaven’s sake, who’s painting? I don’t think I am. My hand moves in ways I want but the colours seem arbitrary. I paint a tree because I’ve been given green and I like trees. Who gave me the green? Ah ham-fisted analogies, life, why can’t you ever even tell me if they apply to you? Questions questions questions and answers lie floating just beyond our reach.
I said I’ve been listening, but am I? I get so caught up in questioning that I think I’ve missed a step, something I should’ve seen. And I dive back into more pointless loops and spirals, why am I worried about being alone? Am I worried about being alone? I’ve been away from direct social contact for months and I’ve never been more consistently happy, so why does that idea of being alone on planet earth frighten me so much?
The canvas isn’t blank. It isn’t black or white. It’s grey. We paint blacks and whites and definite colours to create some comfortable polarity but behind it all, it’s grey. It’s always been grey. Why do we keep covering that up?
Give me an empty grey room, a concert hall in beige. Give me wishy washy colours that don’t know who they are. Don’t force me to paint in bright polarity, in stubborn certainty. But even my desire for grey doesn’t sit still. I want the certainty of grey, doesn’t that defeat its purpose?
My brain is a whirlpool at times, at others a crystal sea. I want to believe I’m one and not the other, I want to believe that others feel the same dissonance. But even if I hear it from others, what am I supposed to think? In a few hours I’ll be content and I don’t know if I’m sane now or I’ll be sane then. But maybe I’m just sane and insane, understood and alone, black and white.
Don’t give me resignation, soul, until your weather no longer changes. Don’t define me, reader – or friend, perhaps – until I define myself, for when I commit myself to a definition I will be truly lost. And life, don’t stop talking. I’ll be listening, in the grey room over there, and I’ll be the one rambling.
Trust, Betrayal, and Too Many Analogies Involving Apples
“Trust me, that apple’s rotten”, says person X.
Person X can be anyone – hence the name – and the phrase he uses is ubiquitous. But when we hear this sort of thing in our daily lives, how many times do we say “no, I don’t trust your judgement, let me see it for myself”? Even if we have any doubt, we either acquiesce to all knowing X or check discreetly when X has left the kitchen. Do we then not trust X? That still seems like a stretch, right? We trust X to tell the truth as he sees it – the doubt surrounds the relation of what he sees to reality.
What, then, is it to trust someone beyond this level? After all, I personally choose to assume that most people are not telling deliberate falsehoods about most things most of the time – it’s a subjective choice, but I think it holds good as a general assumption (unless you’re in the mafia). Hence, I believe that to truly trust someone is to trust their judgement to be sound, and to accept their beliefs on their perception of the truth with almost as much credibility as you accept your own, while simultaneously believing in their willingness to share their true perception.
…but there’s a catch in this conception – if I accept this to be true trust, and decide it is worth giving to anyone outside myself, I necessarily permit a knife to permanently hover behind my back. Hyperbole schmyperbole, but essentially it creates the unavoidable possibility of being very badly hurt when you least expect it. Why?
The problem begins with your own judgment. It follows that the only way to trust others is to trust your judgement of them, and therefore that the only way to trust others is to trust yourself. You have to trust both that your judgement is sound and that you are willing to admit that judgement to yourself. If anyone can have that much complete trust in themselves, it goes without saying that they risk self-delusion, narcissism, hubris, and all the associated vices that follow.
Problemo two is a big one, and it comes from the assumptions I made about trust. Not much harm can come from believing that a person is saying what they believe to be true if you hold back your trust on the validity of their judgement. Nor can much harm come from trusting someone’s judgement as sound and taking it into consideration while not putting one’s whole trust in it. But if you do both simultaneously, and if someone is intelligent enough to convince you that their judgement is sound, can’t they also be devious enough to hide their true intentions? Or, if your own appraisal of the other’s judgement is flawed (as is highly probable), can’t they just feed you an endless stream of well-meaning misinformation?
Of course, it’s important to consider the fact that we generally only ever let a few people into that special zone of trust – but the vulnerability it provides is less an Achilles Heel and more a Pandora’s Box. If someone with not-so-jolly intentions or well-intentioned lapses of judgement makes it into my complete confidence, they can meddle with my very conception of reality. If I totally trust X and they pronounce a rotten apple to be alright, the apple becomes perfectly edible in my reality, and I start to doubt my own sanity or my ability to admit that I’m bad at buying good fruit – in other words, I doubt both my judgement and my ability to state my judgement to myself. Hence, even one bad apple in my circle of true trust leads to me distrusting myself. And once I distrust myself, logically, I can no longer trust any of the people I previously trusted, and my entire sense of social reality collapses.
This conclusion might seem overly logical or extreme, but I don’t think it’s that farfetched. I think a lot of people can relate to a betrayal of some kind in their life – big or small, intentional or unintentional – that causes them to reconsider their basic ability to make choices. This is just my way of rationalising why that happens, of categorizing its effects and trying to fight the disorientation that comes afterwards.
But then, of course, the question changes – if this is the state of affairs as I see it, what’s the best response? If we’re going to stick with logic here, you can see it as being dependent on how inherently good you think people are – i.e. just how many bad apples you expect to find per barrel of humanity. But when you consider each bad apple to not just be rotten but poisonous – considering how much damage they can do – is it worth ever actually letting your guard down?
In the end, there’s no straight answer. The truth is, as with all things, pain is inevitable. Whether or not X is there to tell you that the apple is rotten, there will be rotten apples, and the odds are high that we’ll eat at least one of ‘em in the span of our lives. On the other hand, the rewards of having true trust reciprocated are invaluable, the benefits of a dependable friend at your back near priceless. And the apple, poisoned or not, won’t be fatal so long as you have some foundation of certainty to fall back upon, whether it be family or therapy or friends who have never yet let you down.
But there’s another, more positive consequence: it means that the value of giving someone that trust is immense. By giving a friend your complete trust, you’re practically giving them your credit card information, or the keys to your house – I think that kind of trust is the greatest gift you can give someone. The very recognition of how potentially dangerous complete trust can be can help us truly appreciate those who have held and honoured it, and especially those who have given us their own trust.
In the end, as with my previous post, the question becomes one of risk – are you willing to accept the possibility of being poisoned to have true, meaningful relationships with amazing people? The answer will wax and wane through hardship and happiness, through betrayals and meaningful bonds of trust. My answer for myself at this point of time is to lay low and guard my trust for a while – events speak for themselves. As for your answer, if anyone is reading this, I wish you nothing but the best for whatever lies ahead. And I’ll stop with the analogies about apples.
Hunger
“You have to learn how to die, if you wanna be alive” sings Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, backed by jangly guitar music – and every time I hear it, I’m scared a little. Not enough to make me stop or pause but enough to nag at me for a while. I suppose the reason why is one of those things you know but don’t tell yourself in words, because saying it aloud makes it all too real. But what am I scared of, exactly?
To answer that, unoriginal me will draw on another ancillary source of wisdom. Herodotus once said “In soft regions are born soft men”, and what I’m scared of is that I’m soft. Not weak, but soft. I’ve been fortunate enough to be blessed with a life that I’m happy with, a family that supports me, a lifestyle of comfort that gives me a freedom many people wish for. I know that, but what is comfort? Contentment? Is to be content to be stagnant? Stopping to smell the roses is a beautiful moment, but does it mean anything if you just stay there?
And while I ask myself these questions, nipping at my heels are the hungry. I don’t mean those who’ve drawn a bad lot in life – at least not necessarily. I mean those who want… no, those who need to make something of themselves, that burning passion and fire, that hunger. They’re the people who make the world, who create the ability for their own children or families to have the ability of being in my position, with the simple ability to stop and think about things like this.
What drives that hunger? I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s the simple difference between needs and wants. Hunger is a need, a primal need for subsistence. Don’t get it and one becomes ravenous – you find some way to get it or die trying. Go big or go home, and out of the hundreds of millions of people the world puts in that position of desperation, some of them make it to the other side. This subsistence doesn’t have to be a literal one. There are people who cannot live without fulfilling a purpose, or a calling – a gift that curses them to necessity, but blesses them with direction.
And here I am, deciding what I want to do. What kind of happiness do I want, what kind of career, what kind of relationship, a never ending series of pipe dreams. But a want isn’t a do-or-die, of course. Not getting what you want doesn’t kill you, it just makes you mope, and I know that and mope about that too. But I find myself in the peculiar situation of wanting to need, of wanting to find a calling or a necessity that drives me away from indolence and second guessing and sinking into the tar pit of comfort.
But, to put it simply, I don’t want to learn how to die. I don’t want to take that leap off the edge of what I’m so accustomed to, this fortunate life of mine. And that’s because death is the ultimate risk. Whether it’s the death of dreams or the real thing, it’s a paralysing abyss to someone accustomed to risking no more than happiness. Risking happiness may seem like a lot, but in the end I have to face the fact that I’m just cutting my losses. If I fail at what I want, I’ll mope and subsist and find something else that I want. If I fail to get what I need, I risk falling into the abyss – but if I don’t fall…
When this lockdown ends, I’ll be thrust into college and the real world and I’ll have to make a choice: am I willing to learn how to die? Maybe I’ll come back here and let you know what I chose some months or years in the future – until then, it’s time to mope until I get hungry, and maybe learn how to live a little on the way.
Fear and Absent Danger
An easy way for me to be unproductive is to hop on Youtube and watch old episodes of the Daily Show. Jon Stewart is a goddamn genius at political satire and I missed his tenure at the helm, so I kinda want to catch up on what I missed…even though I’ve watched each video at least a million times over, but that isn’t the point. Those familiar with his work will know that the Daily Show often uses pretty tongue-in-cheek captions and titles for his segments and sub-segments, as many shows of its mold do as well. However, little did I know that one satirical title would forever change my attitude towards an issue I have faced for as long as I can remember.
I have always had problems with anxiety. I’ve never been “diagnosed” with it, and I honestly don’t quite know if what I experience is what psychologists associate with the term, but it’s been such a normal part of my life that I can’t imagine life without it. I’m immensely anxious in anticipation for anything of even minor importance – music performances, class tests, saying like 3 words in front of an assembly, meeting new people, reuniting with old friends. My stomach does backflips, my chest feels heavy and like something inside it wants to get out, I go in loops of random thought that get worse and worse until I want to run away, I get so nauseous I can’t talk. For the longest time, I believed that there was nothing I could really do about this but “breathe in and out”, and that never really seemed to work. Though my mother always says “it’s all in the mind”, that mantra seemed not to apply to me.
Now, political satire may seem kinda unrelated to my anxiety issues, and that’s because it is. I was watching a random segment when a title popped up on screen that I didn’t really pay attention to at the time – “Fear and Absent Danger”, referring to the Republican fears of a “takeover of Texas” following a standard military training exercise (it’s available on Youtube, I’d highly recommend watching it). I just thought it was funny and moved on, but it was after few more re-watches of that segment that I noticed something.
The anxiety I feel comes about in anticipation of anything for which I don’t have control over the outcome, for any situation with which I am not familiar. My endless thought loops always revolve around possible outcomes of these situations, a never-ending list of what-ifs. However, what I never used to do was examine just how disproportionate my anxiety and fear is when compared to the actual consequences of my actions in these scenarios. Though these situations tend to elicit a fight or flight response in me, I never really stopped to look at what it was that I’m fighting or running away from. I asked myself: What is the worst that can happen? Are the potentially negative outcomes really bad enough to justify me giving them so much of my time and energy? And the answers were clear and simple: nothing, and nope. The last time I messed up during a band performance, nobody even noticed. That class test I don’t want to fail is a tiny part of my education, and a minuscule part of my life as a whole. My fear and my anxiety revolved around perceived, yet absent, dangers that punched well below their weight.
Now that I had realized this, the question then became: What am I gonna do about it? The answer to that one wasn’t – and isn’t – as easy. Of course, every time I feel anxious and nervous and gross ahead of these minor things, I tell myself that I’m overthinking, that the worst case scenario is a 0/10 on a scale of importance. I repeat the mantra of “Fear and Absent Danger” again and again, trying to use it to calm me down and enable me to see things clearly. This has helped me control my anxiety immensely, but there is a limit beyond which I cannot reach. After all, though we humans might consider ourselves to be rational beings, anxiety is a wrestling match with the primeval remnants of the caveman brain, the parts that don’t listen to reason and tell me that my very survival depends upon the outcome of these things.
Nevertheless, the next time I feel the telltale signs of my anxiety come knocking, I’ll remember the words of wise old Mr. Stewart and fight my demons as best I can. And though I don’t see anxiety disappearing from my life any time soon, I really hope I can keep pushing it back one step at a time… after all, I’m on a winning streak, aren’t I?
The Galley with No Name 