Warm November Rain in anticlimatic
- Nov. 4, 2022, 11:21 p.m.
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- Public
What a beautiful evening. I walked to the store after dark in the rain. It was warm so I wore shorts with a raincoat and umbrella. I don’t have much of a sense of smell any longer, but I could still taste it in the back of my throat. That warm rainy night in November kind of flavor.
I can’t get over how much people mean to me tonight, and how much they have meant to me. How much more time I wish I could have with them. How much more time I wish I did have with them. Something about the rain really opens things. I feel more connected with humanity than I have recently- though some fresh ponderings have arisen.
First- do I have a pathological need to live in a state of rebellion? Is it immaturity refusing to be outgrown? Do I choose the society I think I wish to live in, not because I actually do wish to live in it, but because that is the society I am most comfortable living in a state of rebellion against? This is a haunting prospect I wish I hadn’t found.
Second- what really is a person? Does everyone invent one to be with their conscious minds?- should everyone invent one to be with their conscious minds? Certainly we want to decide what we are, yet we have no real control over what origin inspires those decisions. Certainly there are things for the greater good that we must do, that we wouldn’t otherwise, that require conscious intervention and programming. If it is so ideal, why does it also feel so disingenuous and fragile? A full time job’s worth of energy required to summon and maintain? Does it really make someone better- or better to be around? It doesn’t seem so to me.
On politics I have to rationalize away the worst of it. It’s growing more difficult but it’s still not unheard of to have kin and peers, who are all good people, of varying perspectives. I wonder if we align our politics with the archetype that most embodies the positive characteristics we wished we had- the person we choose to aspire towards- and if we transmute self loathing and contempt towards the archetype that most embodies the negative characteristics we actually have, and resent.
One can create security yet long for art, and one can create art yet long for security.
Last updated November 04, 2022
Sleepy-Eyed John ⋅ November 05, 2022
You're too smart dude.
I think people generally want good things. Most in a perfect world.
Miss Chiffs Manager ⋅ November 06, 2022
These are great questions, but morally empty. The core of humanityis morality.
So, who we are are is a decision of course, one that is made fundamentally at the very beginning of thought; pre thought, really.
Almost no one acknowledges the role of their own choices in their life, and this is what "we" curious types are made to feel bad about for questioning. Your not particularly rebellious for asking questions; that is your nature. It is everyone who'd rather stay in the dark that wants to convince you you're bad in some way for discovering a light. And, that is a moral problem. Because the shallow people in the dark would use aggression, force, corrosion, etc, to control you, they create the evil that they suffer from. And punish us for pointing it out.
anticlimatic Miss Chiffs Manager ⋅ November 06, 2022
All of my questions regarding morality seem to have been answered some time ago. I think I might have led off with those when I was a young adult trying to make sense of the human experience. Maybe I missed something though. I feel like morality is generated as a necessary psychological stop-gag to deal with a specific human paradox- comprehending the finite, like our own time on this earth, with the infinite- the way the present rolls forward into the next moment and will never cease- like reading a book which never ends.
Miss Chiffs Manager anticlimatic ⋅ November 07, 2022
Why would morality be necessary for a rational/scientific explanation of reality?
Those are distinct questions and don't require metaphysical explanation at all.
anticlimatic Miss Chiffs Manager ⋅ November 06, 2022
--cont. (I dont realize I am making no sense until after I reread what I just wrote)
I feel like morality is just what we fill that space of "unknown" when it comes to answering questions and meaning and motivation. I feel like we have those questions because of the odd and horrible nature of reality, and our own misfortunate mid-range capabilities for understanding it.
Miss Chiffs Manager anticlimatic ⋅ November 07, 2022
How do you know that our capabilities for understanding reality are mid range?
How would you measure our capabilities for understanding reality?
I have thought this before a few times so I think I'll mention it here- but Nathaniel Branden in Psychology of Self Esteem answers the question that seems to be begged in many of your statements. Like the fact that our psychological capacities (including rationality and imagination/metaphysical thinking) are perfect for comprehending reality. The fact that mental illness exists is proof that some peopleare less fit to competently meet reality. The measure of mental health is the level of competency that we perceive and think about reality accurately. We can measure this empirically, in objective outcomes.
I think that, as Branden argues with evidence, mental illness is the degree to which an individual denies reality in preference for the comfort of nonthinking. Which is to say, the extent to which as a child, an individual is allowed and encouraged to be honest.
Morality is the application of universal abstract concepts- which is exclusive to and therefore the meaning of human beings. It begins with the ability to think- and so if the ability to think is hindered or in any way harmed in a child, a great evil has been committed.
Almost everyone is and has been subjected to this evil. And also been trained into emotional defense of having had this evil done to them (see Alice Miller, DeMausse). So, clear thinking is an incredibly rare and difficult to achieve ability. It is nonetheless the birthright of every human being. It is the recognition that great evil has been perpetrated upon each of us that at once frees us to pursue our birthright and enables us to inhabit our meaning - which is fundamentally moral.
anticlimatic Miss Chiffs Manager ⋅ November 07, 2022
I think that morality is only necessary to maintain sanity. If self awareness can be considered a gift, even an extraordinary one, an equally extraordinary price must also be paid- and in our case I think it is some degree of madness. Interesting that researcher also correlates poor mental health with a lack of morality, though we seem to have our causes backwards- he might think sanity flows from clear thinking and the role of morality is to put form to the objective benefits of this process, but I think sanity flows from morality as I define it (not exactly the same I think, for some reason), and it is Thinking that puts form to the objective benefits of this process. How I define morality is, on the surface- 'value judgements on the way the world aught be ordered'- but when considered with some depth, with the fact in mind that a judgement is quite identical to a conclusion, there are certain elements of life that both demand a determination and forever systematically lack the conclusive information one might need to do so. Morality steps in to take a guess. Propose an acceptable stand-in, or direction- in the dark. Absent that, it's spinning madly in loops and paradoxes.
I think our capabilities are midrange just intuitively. I think we are the dominant creature on the planet that can manage it, but looking at our competition in the animal kingdom, it doesn't seem like a whole lot to be proud of. I mean, if we're just a little better than monkeys, that's not saying a whole lot. So I assume there is some being out there, maybe a bit larger/slower/older, that could easily trounce us into a midgrade position, overall. And that's not even getting into the nature of relative size/speed- horton hears a who style. What if all existence on earth from big bang to heat death occurs inside a drop of water falling on some metaplanet outside our scope of perception? What if universes can be born and die within a millisecond-- in an electron? We certainly aren't perceptive enough to see what things look like at any scale other than the one we're built for.
anticlimatic Miss Chiffs Manager ⋅ November 06, 2022
(Did the message beginning with "--cont" replace the longer message that preceded it? Do I not know what I am doing at this machine?