… meme from the upside down world.
Another sixth mass extinction meme. There are sure to be many more of these and other thoughts, and passions, about “THE PREVENTABLE DEATH OF HUMANS, MAMMALS, AND MOST SPECIES FROM THIS PLANET”
If looming Extinction doesn’t wake us up once and for all, the actual extinction will put us to rest once and for all.
R U with May?
title: Wandermust (draft)
subtitle: Boredom to Motivate Human Migration
[MEME to be associated “Nomads, because we were happy”]
Boredom, it is assumed, is a fairly universal, recognizable, and linguified term across all modern cultures. If we inspect it as an emotion that has arisen because it offered some survival advantage, what is it’s utility? It tells us to leave a particularly nice area where we may have settled and to keep moving on. This may be way off the true reasons, but perhaps not. A hypothesis relating to boredom through depression, which is quite similar in many of its manifestions, is remedied in some people after ECT, which is well known to cause memory loss. ECT destroys the normalizations imposed by a repetitive landscape. Instead of moving the body and brain to a new location, ECT removes connections within the brain to the stagnant life. Everyday life can become more interesting, albeit a lot more challenging where normalizations and a good memory are requisite; this is why ECT is usually not a true solution but a misguided transferrence that treats a symptom.
Dogs, sedentary man’s best friend, offer an illuminating contrast. Though we cannot ask dogs directly, presumably they do not experience boredom in the flavor or intensity that we do. This relative lack of their ability to feel it would be bound up with their territorial nature. Boredom tells us we have worn out our welcome, and because our loyalties would all lie with our fellow band of humans rather than with a specific place, we could move without any feelings of betrayal to counter balance against boredom. Dogs on the other hand are very loyal to their specific land, and boredom of that land would compete within them and not be adaptive.
We speak of domesticating dogs, as with other animals, but the contrary is probably closer to the truth: dogs domesticated us, or were a greater influence than many would like to think in our own domestication.
2016 Add ins – The need to keep moving (must wander) would logically be linked to our predisposition as a hunted species, and boredom would be an instinctual way of deep rooting this need were we not to have intellectually arrived at it. The guerilla mentality runs deep in us, and it explain to me another lifelong personal trend: I’ve had lots and lots of chase dreams in my sleep—it’s the majoritarian theme of the dreams I can recall, and they’ve always been quite adventurous and usually more fun and thrilling than actually scary. There was always a comfort in the chase dreams that I was always at least one step ahead of my pursuer(s), which were only sometimes of human type. However, it is noteworthy that fear would also be an emotion that would run deep in us, which would give explanation to how fear is so often used to manipulate us. It is a evolutionary vulnerability to say the least.
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title: Working Towards Extinction (meme)
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title: In Defense Of Hypocrisy: May We Should On Ourselves
“It’s better to should all over other people as you do on to yourself”
“A world without hypocrites is a world without ideas”
Succumbing to the rebukes of a society that would attack an incomplete but evolving praxilogical action when it is vulnerable and in its infancy, is precisely the vast conundrum facing us that stifles and has us stifling our own liberation from many an oppression. Whether we are the “hypocrite” or the one shouting out “hey hypocrite!”, we are choosing to intervene in a process to which we were previously outside of and now deciding to attempt to stop. Sadly for us all, the process in to which we are choosing to add toil to by calling the purveyor “hypocritical”, is often a process which has as part of it something we would want to see realized. The part that follows the normative “should” that the hypocritical speaker was articulating is quite often a beautiful and imaginative idea for a better path to go down. However, too too quickly and too often we fall in to the trap of frustration with our situations and attack and belittle one of our own who shares a common dream. Let’s take an example before any more general ruminations on this matter:
“There should be more farmers” is said by someone who is not a farmer, and it can obviously be attacked as a hypocritical statement. “Actions speak louder than words” might be a reply of someone in the audience, but I would counter that in a society so deeply invested in the symbolic realm as ours that speaking certain words (especially ones that shine light on an uncomfortable reality) is the loudest of actions. The backstory to this farmer advocate and speaker is that s/he might have severe economic or health restrictions, or are time-bound elsewhere. I would urge us to admire that the person even goes out in to the public sphere and braves to speak such a prescription, and tries to influence the minds of their fellow humans (rather than yield and be quiet, giving the corporate media even more uninterrupted time to shout their propaganda that will instead fill all of our minds). Perhaps by saying it out loud and prescribing such an ideal, the person will naturally move closer to realizing it themselves as well. If one always waited to be the perfect example of such-and-such a thing, we would all always be waiting.
Hypocrisy is a necessary stage in the growth process. Unrealized ideals, which are a great part of the human condition, should and could all be labeled as hypocritical, but I don’t think they should have attached to them the negative, pejorative label of hypocrite. Ideas often need to be voiced in their ideal state before they are immediately rushed in to. The human evolutionary adaptation of a grand capacity for ideas will come to include (depending on the person) many ideas that are unthinkably horrific that fortunately we never go on to realize. One might even say out loud “should kill all…”, but then are reprimanded for speaking of violent things; but this is a good thing, for now the person can see a perspective from their audience that shows them that their idea is a faulty one, and at this point no one has yet been hurt or killed by its realization. Calling them a hypocrite in this manner would only serve to cajole them forward—it is more important to be wary and cautious but also firmly replying that their ideas are bad ones. So, too, when someone presents good ideas that they have done little to realize, the ideas should be praised as good ones. Perhaps later on if there is some stagnancy in this “idea stage”, one can try to move the person along towards realization, but a space and time for the evolution of a theory to find its grounding in practice is necessary if any complex and meaningful ideas are given a chance to root in to our world.
We must evolve the new out of the old, which means that despite what newness we hope to usher in with great haste, we will still be mired in much oldness that is stuck on us like clothes, making us appear to be dressed differently than we speak: voices of hypocrisy. For those who are just paying lip service to ideas that they make no clear pathway to ever realize, the word “hypocrite” is reserved. So not all hypocrisies ought to be glossed over all of the time, but hypocrisy enforcement should not be a reactive principle of action which is used in a knee-jerk fashion. It is a concept that should be flexibly understood and applied with a full understanding of the evolving context in which words and ideas unfold alongside—but often before—the things with which they are about, unfold too.
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title: Passing On Guns
title: The Human Conditioned (meme)
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title: Literacy Prison And The Atrophy Of Critical Thinking
Language is a tattoo on our brains that we did not consent to.
Generally Spoken Language. Perhaps the ability to speak and understand oral language is a gift—as it is now an important aspect of accessing a nurturing community during, but most especially after, childhood. Unfortunately, language also is a gift to the state and other coercive entities, as these now have a pre-formatted body on which to exert calculated domination over. It is a narrowing in to a formalism the avenues by which communication can travel; language leads to massive and unnecessary brain pruning as it happens before there are much of any contrasting experience from which to draw meaning of the repeated utterances. If mothers and others sang more in the presence of the wonderful new life inside of her belly, rather than opt for the harsher communication methods of arbitrarily uttered and normalized homotonic language, think of how much more of a pre-figuration of joyousness would come along with the new born baby. The bars of disharmony that cage the songless bird are sown early before flight could be attempted.
Specifically Written Language (neo-language). Less shrouded in pre-historical and pre-agricultural uncertainty is written language, which is far more nefarious than the less mediated spoken language, albeit built atop its prefigurations. Eyes evolved for seeing are utilized more and more for reading symbols, the problems with this evidenced by a multi-century trend of weakening eyes due to atrophy (and a poorer diet as a contributing factor, and lack of sunlight, which is typical of science studies missing the forest for a tree). Weaker eyes is not an isolated effect of literacy, for the whole body is effected in a myriad of ways when imposed upon by words and other symbols. The “keep off” sign trying to assert the power of property to narrow the motion of literate peoples, has no effect on the illiterate person who has additional freedoms of roaming; one’s name on a teacher’s board is itself an indicator and a means of punishment or reward, a conditioning that bemoans of the manipulation of domesticated dogs.
Rules and laws generally, which are the paper-trail burdens that the youth must inherit from their olders who think they are bestowing them with an accumulating progress, are a great disservice to the critical faculties of humanity; the vector by which this plagues is primarily enabled is written symbolic language. Some rules will block freedom in the name of safety (i.e. the “keep off” sign) but really what is created is a lack of vigilance that leaves “the benefactors” of the rule with their guards down for many but the most obviously dangerous situations; the illiterate roamer, a rarity these days, is alternatively much more used to being aware of his surroundings and much more ready to detect danger, sign or no sign. There is an insidious assumption on the part of the less vigilant—behind which there have been no less than millions of deaths—that since so many different things have danger and caution statements, that those things and situations without such stated warnings are automatically safe and have been somehow already vetted.
To continue with the safety theme that serves as one main justification of laws and rules, it is in contrast with the much more naturally dangerous and much more naturally safe world prior to rule-overload that the world now filled with artificial safety regulations is a poor trade; things clearly and preventably dangerous are traded off for a series of questionable, dubious forays that have guarantees issued by faulty human oversight (which allows for a continuation of the stream of unfortunate victims to the mis-regulation by reliance on laws). We are in the world of infrastructurally induced paranoia than naturally effervescent pronoia, and the whole is resultantly weakened.
The Symbolic Realm Blunts Critique. Critical faculties atrophy as a direct correlation with literacy, I would argue, and it is a deal of an effort to ensure that critical faculties are reactivated and sharpened using the literacy faculties. Critical thinking can be taught using symbolic texts, but it is not because of these texts that it is enshrined and the leap across the chasm is not necessitated by any teleological force, but a free choice that coincides with the inherent freedom of critical thought. Critical thinking is the spine of the long lineage of humans and pre-human lifeforms that have successfully continued their lines in to the present precisely because they were able to see through and think through traps, scams, ensnarements that would have weakened or killed them off were they not able to. The imaginative and artistic capacities evolved within all of us—obvious in children before they are educated out of it as Picasso famously lamented—are foundational to critical thinking. Without any ability to envision an alternative (or a counter-history), a critique has no base from which to leap off from, and a criticism only exists as a grumble rather than an agent of change; Paul Valery nicely captures this when he offers “naming the things that are absent is breaking the spell of the things that are”. Mainstay schooling that most of us undergo often instructs neatly formed methodologies that must be adhered to, and, in so doing, critical thinking cannot be supported but must atrophy for want of expression. While science and math are requisites, creative writing is an elective few any longer elect; and creating thinking is an art few can any longer select.
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title: Anthropomorphization And Similar Symptoms
Imbuing non-human entities and beings with humanness—whether encountered in fictive poetry/prose, or in the crude form of calling trains “Thomas” and “Percy” with faces painted on—are attempts to fill deep voids that humans are sensitive to in our interaction with the world. The widespread use and independent origination in different cultures of anthropomorphism is indicative of a lack of actual deep human interaction (quality) spread across enough persons (quantity), something that advancing civilization seems to rob us of. All of us who are Cast Away via alienation with a less than sufficient amount of tribal-level intimate relations will create or subscribe to as many “Wilsons” as needed to make up for the lack we feel. “Wilsons” can drop out as we mature and be replaced with other “Wilsons”, whether they be new anthropomorphisms or actual people that we can idolize but are not truly interacting with (i.e. television show hosts).
A fiction I tell myself for psychological benefit (when I have the thought and focus to do so) is that the piece of red meat I am cutting and chewing and swallowing, was from a hunt that I went on earlier that day (a group hunt or solo). I imagine it was done with primitive weapons in a completely non-domesticated setting, and I imagine the animal alive while I/we were tracking it. Intuitively I think that this flight of imagination is mentally healthy, and an additional appeal is that it constitutes a break of the absurd western moral code of intentionally bearing false witness, or a supposed weakness that is presumed when one lies to oneself. If our primal wanderings can have a refuge in our minds, than lets keep the torch alive there while we work out some possibilities for nomadic living outside of our minds!
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title: Civilization Trapped (meme)
don’t hear them? don’t despair
speak them, to show you care
¡The ends destroy the medians! ¡Rub out the rubbish!
¡For once the law of the excluded middle properly utilized!
¡At the end of the day, a 9 word pledge of allegiance that one can stand for that begins their day!
There were a few alternative wording options available, but I stuck with the fewest words for the pictured meme. One other option which might more clearly convey the intent I had when the thought of this concept occurred to me, is this: “If fish out of the water become food, what does a human off the land become?” This wording, I think, gets closer to my original criticism, which is humans moving in to cities and the extremely vulnerable position we put ourselves in with regards to other land possessing humans. However, the multi-layered interdependencies with the land are so complex that the other meanings such as erosion, land degradation also get across a common fate for all of us if we don’t soon rethink and reacquaint a relationship with un-modified land.
we humanize cars as cars dehumanize us
we call it wind damage, trees call it counter-terrorism
cages for our bodies, cages for our minds
For more context on my tirades against cars, this post here fills in some gaps. I am fortunate enough to have not lost anyone to a car crash, but it is never out of the realm of possibility so long as these dangerous machines prowl the Earth; tens of millions of others have not been so fortunate to steer clear of car injuries and fatalities, and it is learning from their experiences and on the behalf of the future victims that we should alter our transportation habits ahead of continuing catastrophe—change before the crisis!
A more overarching diagnosis of many of the problems we face registers when we look at the role metals play in our industrialized world.
Subverses 