disenchantedbunny.

The religious person looks at the world through the lens of their own reasoning and all the evidence seems fit so seamlessly. Assuming that you buy into the ‘truth’ of this far-fetched story about ‘the brain constructing what is reality’ that is going around (seems like a contradiction between these terms here, eh?): how do you get out of this mess? Perhaps you look for evidence of good and evil in the world. Well, when the options are to see random chance or miracle survival against all odds, it doesn’t seem too far a stretch to see divine intervention. The drive for coherence in human beings leads to conservatism. The less revisionary beliefs are more likely to make the cut, the more conflicting impressions ready to be axed to salvage the whole. From what I can tell, this is the sole appeal of miracles: otherwise reasonable people would be happy to believe that miracles could exist in the world as long as it gives credence to their otherwise overtly sanguine beliefs. What other reason do you have to justify such a belief in a deity: that you’ll go to heaven for it? Such egoistic beliefs don’t carry any convincing weight; you have to believe that your god is working around you to avoid looking like such a selfish prick. So each observation of low probability will most likely lead to confirmation of miracles. How do you angle out of this anachronistic circle, assuming you’re one of the unfortunate to be sucked in before you have the ability to fend off such viruses? One would assume that you’d just keep talking non-stop and heading nowhere, like any viciously circular reasoning leads to.

But look at this constant self-critical barrage that comes from us Socratics. The never-ending questioning that we’ve trained ourselves to appreciate is second nature now. Each move, each step that we make is marked by indecision and scorn, scepticism and indignation, having the arrogance to not let anyone else be our own worst critics. Each decision will be perceived as providing further questions, further confirmations of your Socratic nature and possible self-loathing. Regardless of any trends in pop-neuroscience, this seems to be a pretty decent self-enclosed circle of reasoning. If questioning absolutes is your maxim, then you’re not inclined to notice a way out when you’re so adept at spotting other questions that you haven’t asked. Once you start, there’s not any way of getting out unless you radically alter your ideas about ‘reason vs faith’.

The optimistic atheists that sincerely buy into the ‘Darwin Awards’ (and I have not met many of them, but they do exist!) posit that we could see the effects of natural selection in our lifetimes as the implications of deeply held religious belief lead to further crazy deaths. But this circle of confirmation bias is everywhere and people do have a tendency to value conservatism. I’m not sure if there are any studies about this, but I’d be interested in reading over any attempts. However, extreme religious belief hasn’t been too phased in the past 50 years, while those closer to atheistic thinking such as moderately religious families have been more inclined to abandon their religiosity (see the census data of most developed nations – but if you are reading this and know otherwise, please let me know).

One of the main benefits that I see in the Socratic position is that it offers a clear way out of the circle – eventually, critical thought turns on itself and wonders what use critical thoughts is. The positives and negatives are both weighed up, but then rejected and scorned because of the circularity. The Delphic shrine, seat of knowledge and wisdom, is left entirely alone in the care of Dionysus sometimes. The sheer psychological balance of the Ancient Greeks was profound, even in a puritan like Socrates. The great bearded man would outdrink and outreason everyone at the table and still be able to return home to his poor family as the sun rose, just as his God Apollo gave his finest blessings.

Where does this leave a contemporary Socratic who is unsure about how best proceed? There are at least one too many *hard* decisions that need making at the moment. I’m far too inclined to the Dionysian option and it seems to be working well so far. But this is clearly not a reliable solution.

However, the dialogical methods that Socrates used that made him such a formidable rationalist relied upon his followers and friends sacrificing themselves and their beliefs to be analytically dissected when needed. There is a distinct interpersonal commitment to rationality. I’ve lost this active element of this discursive model. I’ve lost the desire to question and upset those beliefs which have the possibility of teaching me something. For one, methods of communication across space/time have vastly improved from oral -> text -> mass-produced text -> internet. However, I’ve also tried to move away from this Apolline trait – Apollo was not only the god of rationality but a ‘social retard’ by today’s standards, twice as likely to overturn these ‘conventional rules’ and appeal to the ‘laws’ of the cosmos at the expense of a marginalised and less educated segment of the populace (Apollo was known as a bit of a womanizer). So now, my inputs and outputs are passive, contrived pieces (like this one) that stand on their own as objects to battle other objects to shower whoever participates with new thoughts and insights. Temporalised text battling other text: much less authentic than human input and output.

Maybe it’s smarter but slower. I’m usually a slower thinker than most people I meet, but this is getting intense. And even if this is true that smart thinking takes longer, it feels fucking empty in the mean time. Pity I can’t be hoping for a miracle, because I could use a blowjob from a godly man right now.

“I’m haunted by ghosts… but I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts… it’s not only the things that we’ve inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They’re not actually alive in us, but they’re rooted there all the same, and we can’t rid ourselves of them…. …I’ve only to pick up a newspaper, and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the country - as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so pitifully afraid of the light.” - Ibsen, ‘Ghosts’ (1881)

Thomas Kuhn writes that people didn’t bother taking Aristarchus’ heliocentricism too seriously because Ptomelaic explanations were doing pretty well for themselves and corresponding with precise observations detailing the movement of the stars. This example is supposed to underline the conservative nature of the sciences, not willing to change lanes when it is on a lucky streak. While our enquiries are not troubling us and we’re making progress in the problems that we are working, there’s no need to question these paradigmatic rules. But the anomalies pile up, theories are clung to, sometimes for their theological significance. However, after a paradigm change, after we have accustomed ourselves to the gravity that the mass of each object exerts, what use are such problems?

I wonder if people stopped believing in demons and ghosts around the same time as demons and ghosts became irrelevant as an explanation? There’s no doubt that the idea of ghosts and demons were once a problem to be explained away (often literally) in a variety of different ways. These are no longer real problems in the sense that probability distributions in quantum fluctuation or dark matter are problems. What other polysemous connotations were lost in paradigm translation though? This is a real question without the added assumption of incommensurability, mind you. How do we get by without ghosts moving our shit, without demons possessing us and making us do crazy things? But more seriously, what are these forces pushing me towards things, well beyond my own will? These things are in no way physically or metaphysically real as entities, pretty safe in saying things like that. This is some real progress towards this type of knowledge. But what of those other connected ideas thrown away? Our heads have been ignored by investigation or cast aside far too quickly with a presumption of simplicity for far too long. Just as the psychological explanatory power of ancient Greek mythology was re-explored by Jung, I’m feeling the need to retrace some medieval genealogy here. I don’t think a brief reading of Dante helped, but the puritan inside of my head is yelling out for some type of sacrifice.

I’ve had ghosts talking behind my shoulder for a while now. They say the damndest things. One ghost taught me how to create my demons on my own, taught me how the implications of the stupidly misquoted “Hell is other people” can get tangled up within one entity. Anyway, I’ve been romancing this one demon for a few years now and it’s been good, but I’m starting to wonder if it is getting in the way of my human relationships. It’s reminding me how little I have destroyed lately. It’s appropriating that feeling of death that’s followed me since I was a child who had yet to experience death. I have these crazy desires and moods that a psychoanalyst would surely be able to categorise but which don’t seem to fit that coherently together. Contrary to my sexy demon, this egoist likes his arms and neck way too much; I may just have to devour some souls, some dreams or friends. That nonexistence simply stopped being so scary and that there are still those ghosts who are scared of it just seems silly. How much light us fatty white kids can dance in, despite getting a tan from the moon! I like these ghosts for their quirkiness, but they don’t know how to party at all.

Anyway, it won’t be long before these booming cognitive sciences begin their archaeological excavations into etymology of these mythic, prescience mumbojumbo ideas to resurrect what might have once given some sense to our internal lives as human beings. Cos despite these interesting ideas, not much has changed re how we (humans) are made in the last couple of thousand years and we’ve only just begun to reflectively piece it (history) all together - all of this cultural imagery won’t be going anywhere either, might as well appropriate it.

Driving cars now; but also, flying on planes. I am circling both a planet and an ego, like regular normal peoples. I travel interstate, overseas, on my own compulsions, alone.

As if that fucking cliché about the traveler escaping themselves wasn’t silly enough, the novelty and irony jumps down your throat and disrupts the unusually palatable tequila that now only barely lines the bottle. Like any good absurdist, this unbelievable world citizen will find both truth and untruth in that burning sensation that he just coughed up in laughter; all whilst putting it to use in some diatribe about the less subtle health risks of religious conviction. This choking is merely a sign that he can be further surprised, further laugh, weep, smile. He’ll talk about himself in third person for a while until he catches his breath and tries to open up the wounds that were just stabbed at (both moments and months ago). Cauterisation is order, chaps.

Locked away like some self-aggrandizing fucking princess in the castle of rural Australia, the pretty (possibly in part autistic) yet parasitically adept rationalist looked out and performed his swan-song laments about the egoistic depths of travel and the dangers of pretentiously long sentences. Again, those seemingly honest absurdists that good clever teenage boys read about, we will find both the truth and the untruth. Travel’s not that bad, home’s not so bad either. Hate and home and love and not mutually exclusive, at least not in so far as I look at my divergent composition. The further we run, we find that we cannot escape ourselves; yet the further we pull into our depths, the hazier and inexact we will find our focus. Like the good princesses in the stories, we tell ourselves that we’re just as disinclined to act. If everything is absurd, then nothing is. Taking a look at some specifics might help to illuminate some path away from this stupidity.

Firstly; this lovely lonely southern clay house is as good and as authentic as it ever gets, despite the subtle differences that might seem like a lover in a lie. All the while, any nostalgia can come back tasting like an attempted dodge / swerve by an admirably self-respecting angel. And each and every one of us has so many angels, should we momentarily drop the scientism and binge on the imagery for a while. These supposed angels, hovering just out of reach, seem to have just absorbed the scorn, reappropriated, reconsolidated and taken in a new foundation of their own in spite of that feeling you can leave in their guts and mouths with such minute physical force. The religious imagery in this southern ‘united’ state will always bring me parables of conquest and suffering, despite the untruth of their theistic origins. I’m now leaning towards the idea that love can be thematically investigated within this context. However, there’s still that stupid conflict between ideas.

Now we look up, scan the frescoes – didn’t these monkeys used to dance for us, as for de Lampedusa’s The Prince? Make up your mind, miscreant: are they relished or relics? Do your awkward words still make their hearts turn, or are they dust through and through? Whatever your answer, there is both force and distance to consider. Force, considered up close – especially when bodily close – is wholly apparent and strong. Considering force at a distance however will increasingly demands inferences. And the demands of this relative concept are forever shifting, asking further revaluation.

(Almost a side note -) Traditional gods also occupy this absurd relation, giving both power and insecurity to their worshiper, yet always at a distance. The god is there for you individually, always with an ear or sympathetic understand and encouragement. Yet the god is at every second capable of calling you out on your inconsistencies, your half-hearted convictions, your doubts and fears. There are still many gods of this type that people chase like shadows that are misread. One senses Freud or Nietzsche in this rambling – they’re probably in there somewhere, absorbed thoroughly beyond acknowledgement. Consider Nietzsche’s Antichrist and Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.

Fucking dogmatism.

Move back away from the abstract theorisations for a moment. You act like this distance is in some sense damaging to both yourself and your partner. How could these standing laws of physics prove so universal and holding if they were not at once acting on such large and discrete objects as planets, systems, universes? Rhetoric again borrowed from Nietzsche, but this time with feeling. The fact that you have both strong influence over others and that such individuals drastically sway your judgement is of paramount importance in building your own strength.

To travel in order to escape self, work, desire, routine, etc (as Alaine de Botton notes in a manner that seems to be unpopular) is delusional. However, contrary to de Botton, such escapism is not entirely untruthful. Equally delusional is the quest to ‘find oneself’, to remove the shackles and embrace the true core that lies beneath. Without this contention, one might fall into the trap of assuming the absolute solidity of the self; not an entirely undesirable position, but a position that has lacked reason for a long while now. You can’t drop everything, either way.

Many people do fall either one way or the other. But this absurdist fucking leaning, this difficult weighing and reweighing, has become far too ingrained to remove. It was there before I knew it was there, it was there before I could decide if I could remove it or not. If we question our desire to want to know, we’ve already been infected. At this point I’m not inclined to think of foundations anymore.

Like that music that holds this piece together, there seems to be some sort of melody or genre to it. A sort of coherent amalgamation is slightly less than the foundationalist monster that I spoke of previously, limbs asunder and each supporting the mainland. Perhaps this coherentist model, this lack of legs, is a fucking cop-out: an easy and non-explanatory solution. The music, surroundings, and harsh words that provoked these thoughts are usual for me. Welcome back to the conflicting interests. However, I still feel entirely whole and happy as a single entity.

But in this contentedness are those I have loved and drastically disappointed (coextensively with such unmet obligation to human needs that I’ve come to interpret in modern religions). You know, just like those who haven’t ‘broken the spell’, I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far, although your disdain and your suffering are warranted. I’m sorry if this isn’t enough, but I cannot ask for a more wonderful life with everything I have seen. Sillier things have happened, but denying how good it has been does not seem like an option for me. I wouldn’t wish that others removed this feeling of cautious contentment with the past, nor would I remove it myself.

This is the optimist. There is also the cynic. Cynicism tries to show humans how they could be, but have not been. Optimism is hope for the future. I think that they’re quite complimentary, but I wouldn’t mind being shown otherwise. In the mean time, here are some of my errors in love, in respect, that I have been working on since before junior high:

1) Lack of empathy.

2) Lack of distance.

3) Lack of affection.

4) Lack of challenge.

Like the cynic I am, I always laugh at how people interpret the world through their own rose-coloured lenses. But I’m a twat, or I’ve always been a twat so far. We’re not that dissimilar, you and I (although probabilistically I’m currently more of a pretentious twat!). We will laugh at each other and at the same time feel the most horrible sense of empathy. I’ve been working on this first lack of respect for so long and now with the help of my students I feel that I’m finally making good ground. I wish I could convey that feeling in a meaningful sense and I hope I can to a few of them. I’ve never really felt like I’ve needed it. Perhaps I have at some points? I know for sure that some of them do need it and that I may finally be in the position to begin becoming one of those ‘healers’ that late Camus talked about (as in, ‘late in life’, not just the dead guy).

Maybe a good start is: how has your week been? What have you eaten, thought about, discussed? What is the best thing that has happened today? By the way, I like your shirt.

The traveler clichés are absurd and stupid, but the settler ideas are worse and far more harmful. Be always at home and always moving. Bottle of tequila has slowly disappeared; take nothing here at face value as per usual.

Wow, I’d forgotten about that last post. What a refreshing rant - relatively dissonant to my current state of mind but amazingly clear as a memory. All of those moments of clarity that I had to rush through last year… and in hindsight, I might have made some marginal impact with this optimistic cynicism that I’m crafting. I wonder how it is that I think so slowly compared to other people. Perhaps either myself or others aren’t thinking hard enough at all.

Dear future-me. Here’s a poem that might reflect your inability to grab hold of anything substantial, that weightlessness that means that gods and spirits have very little gravitational pull on your thoughts and feelings.

Content and demanding
Nothing more than that I became who I was
And that any regret became mine to know and own
To make a home for any scratch or laughing reply
Lest these neighbours invite us into their homes
Alone with friends and that part of us in them
We’ll colour skies with our moods and forget
About as many lies that we’ve yet to tell ourselves
Any future tree that offers branches to sleep under
Or on and above but depending on the weather
In our imagined orbit and passers-by forever
Always at home

Since you’ve came back here, future-me, have a good hard think about how you fostered that elusive combination of self-efficacy and resilience this year. And how you’ve stopped being so god-damn serious.

Miracle of fucking miracles, the spam comments are better than the drive-by religious repetition that drips into some of these posts. They are both as pointless and irrelevant, but at least some of the spam comments and URLs are entertaining. I have decided to clean up my comments by allowing a small portion of the spam through; these comments have certainly improved my efficacy with their kind and encouraging words.

Let this be a testament to the progress made in AI by spambots everywhere - these machines have created messages more appropriate than the vague cliches tossed about by the fleshy morons who feel compelled to make religious comments on a blog that posts a couple of times a year.

And what aggrandizing, self-depreciating wit the author uses to cut them down to size!

Long live those days that saw me scratching together some sloppy and lightly intoxicated rambling as a warm up for the things I was actually trying to write. Nowadays I’m sober from the boredom of being such an encouraging and contributing member of society: so sober, decaffeinated and bored that I’ve crept here at night to try and recall what that was like.

That was less than a year ago. I’ve been a positive role model for too long already. Give me my peers back so I can cut a hole in our reasoning and crawl back into that unfortunate gaping womb to hibernate. I need to stop ignoring those trendy, pseudo-academic, barely empirical educational wankfests and jump on board with some of those common counterexamples that philosophy majors are often vaguely familiar with. I need to re-envelop myself in those words, ideas and argumentative essays that birthed me while others around were content with writing soap operas. So many of those people I used to know are now parents, creating new life while they are still so incomplete in what they could become: soon everyone from back home will have started this cycle all over again, much to the dismay of us less-than-serious educators who would be content to kill off the industry if it meant an improved world in which more parents saw worth in educating their kids. It’s as I predicted before puberty set in. I’m tired of being correct in my cynicism. It needs a cathartic release and these reflections aren’t quite enough.

Funnily enough, most teacher are also masochistic introverts. Perhaps this can be my home away from home for a while, a recluse from the outside world and a justification for not ‘growing up’. That academic world that is truly fit for my stupid egoism will still be around and unchanged in a couple of years time.