Why The World Sucks

Everyday I am assaulted by individuals decrying the state of the world. Both online and in person, the trend is staggering and it does not seem to be slowing up any time soon.

Now, it is facile to look at the world and say, “yeah, things are pretty shitty”, and give credence to the misanthropy pandered by these comrades; however, it is always better to take a closer look at things.

Given how humans process and perceive space and time our observations are generally littered with biases and flawed beliefs. Moreover, given that none of us possess the ability to “go back” and experience other periods in time, we have only primary and secondary accounts of events that we must extrapolate information from. Imagine if 600 years from now the only transcripts they had of the Bolshevik Revolution was from Soviet literature from the 60s? Or imagine if the only source of American history was from the textbooks published in the 80s? At face value this may not seem like anything important, but we have changed our textbooks immensely in the 30 years since the 80s. Communist “history” is rife with hyperbole and nationalism; a “clear” picture would not be established.

The idea that the world is any worse than it was 5, 10, 500, or 5,000 years ago is absolute nonsense. The world has been the world since humans started creating societies. I hear people say, “no one loves like the generations of our grandparents”, yet, taking the time to talk to one’s grandparents renders very intriguing answers. Infidelity was just as real then as it is now. The preponderance may be more salient, simply because of the changes in social normatives, but the deviant behavior that we denounce now has been around since the beginning of recorded history.

This brings me to the entree of this post. Society. One of my favorite books on human nature is The Social Construction of Reality by Luckmann and Berger in which they describe in didactic detail how socialization leads to what we come to call “reality”. Although the “sociology of knowledge is still considered a tenuous pursuit, they do bring to light some very interesting characteristics of human experience. One of these is the tendency for humans to treat society as if it is not a human construct.

Most of us are familiar with the term ’emergence’ or its more fad-ish emanation ‘synergy’. The unifying point in both of these is that the sum is greater than its parts. When two or more things come together they actually create structures that are larger than addition would say so. Social structures then emerge as superstructures as people come together. Examples are education, religion, and legislation, structures that I have traditionally referred to as linear agreements. These structures are not the product of one person nor can any one person come along as change them asymmetrically; they exist as independent realities and are usually treated as such.

Society, the largest of these social structures, is more or less a conglomeration of these agreements and because of its breadth seems to exist independent of any one person. It is by proxy treated as a non-human entity or at best non-individual entity and non-distinct descriptors such as ‘they’, ‘people’, and ‘the man’ become the predominant monikers. Society is constantly evolving, expanding and collapsing per the movements of its constituents, and these changes are mostly imperceptible to individual people; thus, it is quite understandable to get lost in the fray and treat society as a distinct entity from one’s self.

The truest irony is, however, that many of those haranguing the parameters of social health are unaware that they are usually just as likely to carry on in the same behavior as those they criticize. They may not directly engage in the same activities but often in other parts of their lives they are just as ignorant, lascivious, salacious, or parsimonious as the “they” they so love to demonize.

Therein lies the perplexity of reality construction. The limits of human perception are wondrous and no where are they more evident than asking people to make observations about the behaviors of others. It seems to me we all carry a bit of solipsism in us; we are ferociously dedicated to our own fitness since none of us can truly put ourselves into the perceptions of others. Perspective asymmetry is not just about ‘not seeing how one could act like that’ but really its not understanding the underlying cognitions that brought that person to that behavior.

Few of us really take the time to develop the acuity to think through why someone else does what they do. It is much easier to superficially consider their stance then abruptly eviscerate it once their logic no longer satisfies ours. Or, in the same vein, it is much easier to pity someone else’s logic then attempt to find ways to ‘correct’ it, the quintessence of condescension. If people don’t think like us they must be wrong.

Concordantly, human experience is a complicated one as each of us identifies his or her self along hundreds of primary, secondary, and ternary (et all) dimensions. In some moments we are who our culture is then we revert back to saying we’re all human. Sometimes its our sexual orientation or region within our home country. Sometimes is a slang term like “nigga”. Sometimes its our religious affiliation, our alma mater, or the type of family we grew up in. Furthermore, many of the complications don’t just come from the dimensions but the motivations behind us choosing the primacy of one over the other. When asking a black person what they consider themselves you will sometimes hear them describing the frustration with being called ‘African American’ as “Africa” is a continent and we were stripped of our refined locale and tribe when the slaves were brought here. This causes a pointed undertow when attempting to describe society and how one identifies with it.

So, although my mind (translated: preferences) strives for actual unity, actual equality, and actual transcendence beyond trivial dimensions, I know that this feat is much easier said than done. The fact of the matter is, the people that cry out for equality the most are usually the most unequitable people out there. The minorities that look for equality usually hope to achieve it by distrusting the entire “majority” and diminishing their authority. The majorities that claim to accept equality really have no vested interested in relinquishing power. Its a shell game.

Society is more than the sum of its parts, BUT it is wholly dependent on those parts. Institutions gain life by people giving it to them. They are not independent realities; they are absolutely dependent on us. Society is a human construct.

So instead of attaching a detached “they” remember that you are a representative of society. Perhaps the same problems you see in the world have started with you. Have you examined your own bigotry? Have you examined your own charity? Have you celebrated a group of people you don’t belong to? Have you denounced a group you don’t belong to?

You are society. Take a hard look at what that means.

bryce

Life is Life

Perhaps its a preconscious motivation or something even more fleeting, but there is without a doubt an overwhelming proposensity for man to describe things. Seemingly, and certainly scientifically, the only way we can consciously go about doing this is a complex system of comparison; we take a new stimulus and attempt to understand against a stimulus we already know.

In my philosophy, this is the reason why there is no cogent explanation of what ‘life’ is. There is nothing to compare it to; it encapsulates anything that one could even try to compare it to. It is the source of all things that are extant. You can make extrapolations about a thing by looking at its derivations, but even those are mere guesswork.

Life is life.

It is the quintessence of infinitude; whereas man can be seen as both finite and infinite, life is stolidly infinite. It is concomitant with the universe, seemgingly its self-evidentiary, discretely animate version of this dyad. The universe is the skeleton, life is, tenuously speaking, its muscle.

See? Even I cannot resist the insatiable urge to specify and cleanly define what life is.

It aggravates the mind like a wanton string on the face of one desperately looking for sleep. It is so pervasive, so interactive, that it seems ludicrous to not be able to explain it in concise terms. Yet, life is anything but concise. It is the perennial “other” existing ever distal from the core of the conscious mind.

Thus, life is not easy, no hard, no short, nor lonf. Life simply is. It is meant to be enjoyed and contemplated, but seems hellbent on never truly being understood. As it persists fractally, all of the persistent “zooms” one can place on it yield the same motifs over and over again, like some maddening Mendelbrot set. You can attack it from every angle and derive precious information from it, but that information only seems to lead to more questions. We may discover applications that serve some social use like vaccines, consumer technology, or weaponry, but the ultimate vantage point of life seems to elude us.

Thus, one can see how the infinite mutability of a man’s persona is possible; he is a derivation of this force of infinite expressability. He is an expression of infinite expressability and possesses the same ability of extant genesis as this ever persistent force.

Life is responsive, adaptive, like some multidimension gyroscope; it can be rigid and unyielding or pliable and ambiguous per the parameters of its incipient expression. It encompasses both the religious zealot and the lukewarm liberal; it establishes them, it nurtures them. They are allowed to create that reality by the very nature it. It welcomes them to their interpretative largesse; however, it constantly beckons those who pursue it to delve deeper.

The infinitude of life knows no right or wrong, no morals or ethics, no normatives or regulations; those are all man’s creation. It knws no rich, no poor, no tortured, no peaceful; those are man’s institutions.

This unyielding force cares absolutely nothing about bills or responsibilities or obligations or fears or anxieties; those are the eventualities of a creature who must make sense of its existence. It creates its typifications, its objectivations, the very framework of its fitness, all as cognitively distant homages to the all pervasive force which it is imbued.

Man must create its arbitrary hierarchal nature; life arranges itself according to the natures of its expression. Under extreme circumstances only certain phenotypes are allow to persist, but under others it is a panoply of existential gallantry. The famous man, the infamous man, and the unknown man must all reliquinsh their earthly vehicles at their appointed demise. Life, at least in this interfaceable dimension, is an allotted gift with no respecter of personage.

It isn’t fair or unfair; life is a reality of chance and balance. Just as lightning is forged out of the imbalance of ions in the atmosphere, life continually balances itself out in the expression of humanity. One born mentally fit but physically vulnerable juxtaposed against the mentally vulnerable and physically fit; the difference between lightning and ions are the dimensions on which life must balance itself are resolutely endless. A man may decry his challenges understanding biology, but possesses a prodigious mind in linguistic arts. Some may fail at academics altogether and excel at raising a family.

Life is peculiar in that respect.

Your life is a gift and you are the result of life being expressed in all those you have come in contact with since your inception. Thus, you are not “Mary” or “Stephen”, you are the continuation of life’s expression; you are the vehicle by which life travels.

So, what will you choose to do? Live conservatively, which you are entitled to do, or push the very limits on yourself as an expression of multidimensional power?

Challenge life to a duration of discovery; you’ll be glad you did it.

She

You are no different than me, see,
You enjoy being admired,
But with scornful disdain you loathe the incongruence of their words.

To one’s self one is passionately ineffable,
To hear their dimensions wallowed by the perception of others..
Unimaginably sacrilegious.

One is sullied when measured by others,
The pristine nature of carefully manicured graces,
So disturbed by their limited sights.

So I won’t call you beautiful or intriguing,
I won’t call you enthralling or captivating,
I will simply call you She.

Canvas II

Such a dialectic we’ve brought in genesis,
Betwixt I and she, we’ve become lay denizens,
Of a factory of fabrication, elucidation of images,
I draw for her and she draws for me.

If I cry for her and she cries for me,
Verily, the scary sea of salt tipped droplets,
Are hardly real any longer, we are both made stronger,
As we craft new visages, new typifications.

The specifications of what makes extant man,
And blessed woman are reformed, renewed, regenerated,
And we both have made it, as we both had prayed it;

We are each other’s masterpieces; master pieces,
Whose crafted features feature the mastery of lasting creatures,
Laughing creatures; happy creatures;
Bound together by passions sutures.

The Mutable Reality

My current pursuits, both theoretically and experimentally, involve untangling the enigma that is ‘reality’. I am a firm believer in the primacy of the social environment as the actuator of thoughts, therefore, I have come to grips that much of my obsession over what is and what isn’t stems from my conservative Christian background. My parents were never the Bible thumping, closed-minded sort, however, I was socialized into believing a very rigid framework of physical life; although our explicit belief in the supernatural added a metaphysical dynamism that is still extant today.

When asking, “what is reality?”, it captures perfectly the essence of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is best described as ‘friction’ that arises when two thoughts are in opposition to one another. For instance, many married couples experience extreme dissonance when the wishes of their mother or father go against the wishes of their spouse. To hold these oppositional cognitions in the mind causes discomfort which naturally leads a person to think or do something in response as a means to reduce this discomfort. Such actions may be to shut down completely, become emotional or even detached, and eventually try their hardest to avoid the topic altogether.

To ponder reality is to test the precipices of sanity. The principles of relativity tell us that spacetime is the substrate in which we all sit within depressions caused by the massive objects around us such as the earth, sun, moon and so forth. This substrate, the fabric of reality, seems so diaphonous, so thin, yet, it is obstreperous to the point of statistical impossibility. On a mental level, to consider what consists of reality is to contemplate factors that have affected us at every point and these constant stimuli are the hardest to consciously detect; they’ve been hardwired into us as “real”. On a physical level, intense scrutiny of this fabric at microscopic levels yields a world of ‘quantum foam’ or intractable probability. Its almost as if the fabric itself works to keep us from truly understanding it.

I personally believe that much of the problems trying to find truth is that so many of us hold on to the idea that there is an interfaceable, absolute truth somewhere deep beneath the folds of existence. While this may or may not be true, another question comes to the surface. If there is some all-pervasive truth, how would we be able to find it in the first place? We interface life through our conscious projection of ourselves. This conscious awareness is purely abstract, taking the abstractions of life and processing them into some cogent application. This implies a very subtle understanding of limit, a true paradox that seems to be a cardinal underpinning of reality. Although abstractions are infinitely malleable, they are usually limited by the faculty perceiving them. In layman’s terms, although the mind my be able to conceive and create an incalculable degree of input information, the output information is still limited to that mind’s specifications.

Thus, reality does become the progeny of the mind; perception does indeed become reality from this vantage point. However, given that cognition is merely the computation of computations, an infinitely recurring sequence of recursions, one can say that perception is not reality either. If a mind is capable of infinite creation then its finite emanation does not constitute the whole of its abilities. Your perception is the finite expression of what you believe is, but that is not the end all for a faculty that possesses outsized ability.

Nothing must be, yet everything is.

What can be said, then? George Orwell introduced a concept in his famous book 1984 that revolutionized the way that many think. It is a concept I have discussed on this blog, doublethink. Doublethink is the ability to hold two opposing concepts in one’s mind and believe them both. For those acute readers, you should be thinking back on the cognitive dissonance described earlier in this article. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort and most people do things to resolve this discomfort. I, as well as former theoretical physicist, David Bohm, and current dean of Rotman Business School at University of Toronto, Roger Martin, believe that the answer to the struggles between cognitive finitude and infinitude lie in one’s ability to thrive in that dissonance. That is, you take no sides, you favor no opinions, and you consider as much of the information available with equal curiousity.

Nothing must be, implies that in and of themselves, nothing on this earth must be anything. Nature and the cosmos thrived for billions of years before us and will thrive for billions more years after. The only intrinsic concept in the entire universe of existence is the fabric itself that gives rise to all phenomena; beyond that, everything is a derivation, an arbitrary meaning, created by the conscious being observing it. Yet everything is, implies that as conscious beings, we will create these meanings and this process of understanding is critical to the fitness of our species.

However, the truly perceptive minds will not try to make an absolute meaning; they are aware of the universal paradox besetting their mind. The Lemniscate Theory, a philosophical axiom, states that we are infinite beings living within the confines of the finite. We exist asymptotically to life, death, and certain physical constants (which may or may not change as we evolve). Thus, one must accept and embrace the tendency to become rigid, along with the necessity to be flexible. One must be willing to adopt the principles of doublethink, to accept and reject, to no accept and not reject, any and everything, including one’s own experience and concept of self. The reason that most of us have a hard time understanding the subtleties of reality is because we have grown fond of our own minds, we’ve fallen in love with our own experiential data, disregarding the phenomena of others.

There are epistemological and ontological questions abounding endlessly, of course; however, these imply a sense of absolution, something that may or may not actually be interfaceable with our current conscious set up. This sets up a perfect explanation for our species; a sort of fractal explosion of expression… As this system proliferates, we exist as discrete identities sharing relevancies on various levels which could, in theory, be mapped out and analyzed. But even that analysis would be subject to analysis and so on, ad infinitum.

To contemplate the conception of reality is a beautiful process of growth. A common misnomer is that dialogue directly means communication between two people. Actually, the root words are, dia, which is “through”, and logos, the word. In other words, dialogue is discovering a meaning through the words. A dialogue can occur within one’s self or within a larger group. Many of these ideas were made clear to me through David Bohm’s, On Dialogue, however, I had begun developing a proto-understanding throughout the last few years.

Reality is about seeing one’s self in all dynamics and contexts; an individual and a collective; subjective and objective; linear and nonlinear. By contemplating these oppositional pairs as dyads, one begins to see just how reality is constructed; more pointedly, one begins to see why the world is the way that it is.

Pondering reality brings one to the edge of current conscious understanding and it chomps at the bit for whatever is next, if there is. An articulated journey into one’s construction of reality begins to fashion together a coherent framework, even if one is aware that the way they think effects it. Getting an accurate read on reality is not unlike Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where one can only get a partial measurement of a quantum system. If you accurately measure position, you cannot accurately measure velocity and vice versa. One cannot accurately ponder reality without affecting one or more variables; this may be frustrating to some, but my admonition is to consider why that is frustrating. By questioning the processes by which you react and respond to this expression of life, you come to understand this whole thing just a little bit better.

Life, reality, is an infinitely variating construct. Not unlike the descriptions of God within religious groups, life is both infinitely complex and infinitely simple. Thus, it can and will mutate. Its derivations can be mutated; they should be mutated. People should play with the expression of life as whimsically as sport or art; its meant to be stretched and contracted, probed and scrutinized. However, one should not consider it abstract or absolute; it is a fractal, a fractional dimension, which perfectly occupies both. It becomes self-evident then collapses into pure theory only to reemerge at some other point as concrete again.

Let your reality be free.

bryce

Chaos: What Is Reality?

I do not treat this blog as an academic source nor do I claim it to be rigorous in an academic sense; however, I do intend for it to be intellectually rigorous by the virtue of the content discussed.

The beginning of understanding is to create the frameworks to attract understanding.

As von Foerster pointed out decades ago, cognition can be thought of as a computation of computations. Although the layman may deeply contemplate ‘what’ he thinks an advanced method of introspection to consider ‘how’ one thinks and to subsequently realize that ‘thinking’ is actually ‘thinking about thinking’. This recursion is a bit difficult to understand outright, but with heavy consideration it eventually begins to make sense.

Another way of explaining it is as a dialectical process between ‘how’ and ‘what’. Its easy to understand that how you think about something sets up what you come to think. If someone asks you how to win a basketball game and your answer is “to score more points”, then you will probably approach the game of basketball as an offensive minded coach or player. The recursion begins when you consider that an offensive minded player feels that he must score more points to win a game. Now the ‘what’, being offensive minded, gives way to the ‘how’, scoring more points. If that player begins to achieve success through this process, he will go on to create a philosophy or way of thinking that continually uses these two premises as complements.

When discussing what constitutes reality responses both sophisticated and naive abound endlessly. As someone with more of a penchant for the social sciences I tend to set up a game theoretical perspective which places myself as an observer on a higher level. Here’s why. The discussion of reality is, in my opinion, not unlike the propositions in absurdism: to find a meaning in life is pointless given the sheer preponderance of information.

To find a rational answer is not a matter of objective possibility, but rather one of current human possibility; humans cannot transcend this invisible boundary of subjectivity and are thus relegated to the parameters of their own subjectively experienced realities.

Ergo, I tend to study “what is reality” by studying what others perceive to be reality, rendering myself a higher order player in any game theoretical system. I am observing the observations of others, creating a concurrent recursion which hopes to entangle the recursions intrinsic to other’s thought processes.

My issue with humans are that we are driven by processes that we are aware of and processes that we are not aware of. Even the most rigorous logician or theoretician is driven by anomalous processes deep within his or her own psyche; we come together to create a larger body of knowledge through such “wisdom of the crowd” processes as peer-reviews and research symposiums, but time and time again history has shown us that we can still be wrong. We are still governed by a myriad of social, developmental, and unknown factors which cause us to think in particular recursive patterns. 60 years ago we believed that neurons were coded one for one with sensory neurons leading to some higher-ordered grandmother neuron. This was widely accepted as fact until it was discovered that there were simply not enough neurons to accept this theory.

Much of our cognition is intuitional; we cannot fully explain through available linguistic methods what we truly believe, yet, we act out our lives according to these beliefs. Arbitrary worlds become institutional opposites as the principles of intuitional thought come against empirical thought and human cognition rushes to fulfill the intrigues of that system. To make matters even more complicated, we are all partially straddling various worlds or institutions; we believe in the rigor or academic pursuit, yet, cling to the notions of a Supreme Being. We cannot fully enumerate why we believe in soul mates; however, we stick close to our beliefs in constitutional processes.

Just a few examples.

When you break down and talk to individuals their beliefs are so real to them; their considerations about reality are so real to them. Even if they do acknowledge some uncertain about the veracity of their opinions, there is always the facile, “thats just the way I see things” clause; a statement that is anathema to the pursuit of empirical truth.

In my higher ordered vantage point, I try my hardest to hold on to as many views about reality as possible. I do not place primacy on intuitional or empirical methods because both are equally necessary. This creates considerable dissonance, obviously, and this dissonance has driven me to cognitive places that I can only precariously explain. Even when I believe that I am on to something it only takes a brief conversation or a cursory experiment to render a theory only partially effective.

It seems to me that life is much like the strange attractors discovered by mathematician Edward Lorenz discussed in chaos theory. The “butterfly effect” describes a nonlinear dynamical system which never fully repeats itself; this effect looks graphically like the wings of a butterfly. Life is neither deterministic nor is it indeterministic, but is simply a confluence of both. However, the overwhelmingly complicated aspect of it is that society, the social construct of reality, is created, legitimized, and maintained by billions of humans which are in and of themselves nonlinear beings.

Much of the world’s confusion is displayed by simply comparing two humans. Only partial agreements, partial agreements, ambiguous goals, many biases, salient and hidden motivators… The list goes on.

As all of us work through our individual confusion (creating “real-life” effects in the process), we set up the emergent structures of the societies around us. Reality becomes a partially natural, partially human superstructure with infinite malleability and infinite dimension, but an individual only has minimal control over that at any given moment (unless they move socially upward and garner more power).

Thus, reality is a self-evident, self-sustaining, self-motivating “program” of sorts; its basic rules are constituted by certain physical and biological probabilities and any higher ordered rules are arbitrations put forth by any being able to contemplate himself or herself (cognition = computation of computations).

This doesn’t seem applicable to everyday reality at first and thats exactly my point. Everyday reality is the confluence of everyone’s individualized, subjective understanding of “reality’, to break those rules requires an ingenuity and a persistence that requires a particular kind of mental recursion to do. One must deconstruct their notion of what is and isn’t in order to reconstruct what they would like it to be. Certain structures of society are simply insurmountable, others are treacherous due to the social rules around them, but, this illuminates not cosmic mandates or supernatural commandments, but simply the continued interaction of human, biological, and physical factors.

When I stand back at this higher-ordered game theoretical perspective, this whole process of life is a veritable madhouse of cognition. He thinks this and she thinks that; I feel that this and they feel that that. The opportunity to create any study is available to any conscious being at any moment and the opportunity to create any meaning about anything is also made available.

bryce

Human Systems

Humans are complex systems that generate even more complex systems during interaction. For generations, we have been trying to understand how to predict future behavior and maximize our own efforts to buffer against any nascent uncertainty. Various civilizations came up with proto-sciences to answer these problems; however, many of those were abstruse, nonempirical, and highly dubious as cogent frameworks. With the emergence of the social sciences, modern generations have attempted to model and code the interactions to the best of their ability, but even these are highly interpretative and anything but certain.

The question invariably remains, then, on what dimensions should we study the interactions of humans? When one is describing the military landscape or the “grand strategy” of national policy, are they not describing the same uncertainties present in the ambiguities of power dynamics in individual households? The strategic environment is described by the acronym VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambuity, but those same factors are the underpinnings of humans as a whole.

It seems to me that although a reductionist approach is logical, these highly segmented methods of analysis cause unintended byproducts to arise by virtue of their separation. Few fail to see some of these enduring commonalities between sciences and proto-sciences because they focus on the differences.

For instance, I know many hardline astrology adherents that swear by the accuracy of the proto-science. Many of them attempt to address the intrinsic friction created by arbitrarily shifting between astrological schools then pointing to the study as a whole to verify their claims.

Forer effect aside, does there not seem to be some veridical relevance in the study of astrology? I mean, I am almost a classic Virgo male, even though exposure to more of the world has afforded me the luxury of transcending some of the more common Virgo male pitfalls. This ostensibly leads into another dimension or domain, that of environmental context…

Many social psychologists see the world as a construct of interactions between individuals; society is a manmade, self-evident reality that is taken for granted and subsequently dehumanized. However, we all know that where we come from is a decent indicator of a preponderance of our actions. This includes those that come from horrendous backgrounds that respond by making “better of themselves” AND those from affluent backgrounds that engage in destructive behaviors. Psychological professionals will then search for the causal linkages in development or socialization that caused one person to act this way or that. Many of those linkages are antithetical to those propagated by astrology or the like.

This discussion of environment ostensibly includes conversations on race and cultural identity, another big factor in how a person is gauged in the world. To add chaos to confusion, the interacting of one culture with another, especially in a highly integrative country like the US adds to the seemingly stochastic nature of human behavior.

With the advent of technology, more and more of us are privy to the inner workings of our friends, acquaintances, enemies, and heroes, thus, confounding the overwhelming amount of variables needed to consider how and why a person behaves the way that they do.

I haven’t even begun to discusss age or maturity level, other nonempiricals such as religious or philosophical inclination, educational levels, or other sort of professional predilections. Every decision we make creations a further complication to our naturally recursive thought processes — everything we do reflects back on itself in a manner that may not be clearly definable from the outside in.

Therefore, in my eyes, they sheer complexity of the world hinges on that fact that humans are, in and of themselves, unable to be defined by any consistent comparative fashion. Factor in chance and this discussion breaks down into a veritable panoply of discrete variables creating partially understood emergent structures. These emergent structures penetrate almost every aspect of our life, legislation, education, state policy, and so forth, yet, they are constructed only partly illuminated!

The next time you ask yourself why the world is so messed up, take the time to do a quick inventory of yourself. Jot down a list of everything you are, think you are, or pretend to be. After some deep contemplation take into account that every single one of your actions affects the delicate human system you are a part of. Then realize there are millions — billions, if you consider yourself a global citizen — whose views vary ever so much from yours. Few are “right” or “wrong”, but all are entitled to the mental creation of what they feel to be right or wrong.

From there its any man’s guess.

bryce

Stratagems

The best laid plans are undoubtedly dubious,
Far from indubitable they are doubly dangerous when digging for diadems.

Men and their crowns;
Man and his delusion,
To deny his own fallibility as he increases inclusion,
In his triadic collusion of mind, body spirit,
He sediments his way and refuses to hear it.

But what is truth?
Oh the value of epistemics,
The endemic inclement inquiries of what is and isn’t,
Knowledge at least.

Let our eyes feast on the infinite hubris,
The interpretation, the variability, the insubordination,
The degradation of information as exchanged denomination,
The nascent, new places that man’s mind takes his mental spaces.

Let us consider the stratagems.

Honesty & Faithfulness

Society is comprised of agreements between two or more people. Those agreements are then negotiated as time goes along. When dealing with something as interpretative of love, those agreements are confounded by the natural passion experienced by the respective parties…

Honesty.

The world is much smaller than it once was. Although there are plenty of mysteries left, societies have been brought together in ways completely unimaginable by populations in history. Although this has generally been a good thing, it has also allowed for a confluence of interpretation and ignorance to abound. We are no longer the insulated rigid societies of antiquity, but, dynamic, interactive populaces that trade ideas, both subjective and objective, which are rapaciously legitimized and consumed.

The result is that agreements between persons are much more complex and malleable than they have ever been. Look at the discussions on education; with so many children from so many different backgrounds and experience levels, it is virtually impossible to come up with comprehensive curriculum that permits equality.

Love comes with its own set of issues. Love can be seen as the qualitative engagement between two persons; it is an ineffable connection whose dimensions can only be expressed by the parties involved, but are affected by a myriad of environmental factors that we can call society. Thus love, in all of its subjective glory, will always be a contentious powder keg of personal conviction and individuated experience.

However, what can be standardized in terms of this concept are the rules concerning the rules of engagement. One cannot tell another how to love, but they can comment on how to create a place for love. Because love is an agreement between two parties, those two parties must be willing to discuss and define the parameters of their connection; a task that is rarely done to the fullest. Instead, people enter into these intense connections with little more than “feelings” and attractions, then wonder why the structure of intimacy they attempt to create is consistently faulty. An agreement that is tacit (unspoken) is an agreement whose tenets will almost aways be violated. As the wheels of love begin to turn, it is imperative that both individuals make clear their comforts and expectations, lest the entire edifice come crashing down.

This is easier than it sounds because humans are hellbent on being complicated. Within our cognitive faculties we have endless recursions, biases, blindspots, and secret motivations; we are driven not just by conscious processes, but unconscious process such as insecurities or hidden pains suppressed by the need to survive. Underneath the pretty veneer of conscious thought lies an anfractuous labyrinth of fallacies and consternation, many of these play prime roles in the destabilization of agreements people individuals. A man who outwardly expresses interest in stability, but is haunted by the fact that his father cheated on his mother and unconsciously mirrors those actions. A woman who engages a man because he is stable, but secretly fantasizes about the adventures possible with others.

With the advent of technology, it is substantially easier for a person to nourish these unconscious desires, hence why the dating landscape has shifted so much since the days of our grandparents. Rigidity and conservatism were the names of the game back then, now its tacit exploration, possibility, and fulfillment.

These confound the integrity of love’s agreements. As aforementioned, love is intensely subjective, thus, its beyond important for two people to make themselves clearly understood while blazing their trail.

However, to be honest with another person leaves far too many feeling vulnerable, especially since one can never truly know if the other is being honest. Moreover, one can never truly know if the other is going to accept what honestly comes out; humans desperately seek validation and acceptance from those they deem important. To be rejected for who one truly is is a nightmare to most; it is a pain that is unbearable. We spend so much of our lives playing various roles — professional, protector, friend and so on — that its almost unnatural to let someone see you for who you are.

Especially when you don’t know who you truly are…

Honesty and faithfulness are difficult because they are cognitively intensive. Although lying is cognitively intensive — it requires much thought to continue a lie — it is usually a substructure within someone’s personality. To be honest and faithful requires an overarching integrity across all aspects of one’s life, not just in the domains of love.

I flirt a lot. A lot. I do so because I am single and I have no obligations to anyone. Even if I do feel some pull towards this person or that, I have little to no vested interest in that person. This keeps me honest because I save that vested interest for the person I create the agreement with. In other words, I save myself in totality for the woman that truly deserves it. Concordantly, when I actually enter into a bond with that woman, faithfulness comes naturally; she is the only one privy to the entirety of me, therefore, she has a distinguished place among my faculties.

Fear precludes most people from being honest; they are afraid of losing things. Their dishonesty is systemic and they probably are not even honest with themselves; faithfulness becomes little more than an abstract concept and a sucker’s choice.

A person should be honest and faithful because that is what preserves the very fabric of our society, the agreements that comprise it. If your intimate agreement is a loose one with an acceptance of extra-relational experiences, then being faithful still allows one to do their thing. But, one must be honest about this from the get-go.

Be true to yourself before you attempt to be true to anyone else; some of the most pervasive lies are the one’s we tell ourselves out of survival or fear. My suggestion is to give none of yourself to anyone until you have created the foundation to give all of yourself. That process of creation is founded on honest communication about who you are and what you expect.

Without that, you are setting yourself up to fail.

bryce

Solipsis

Thinking is like parenting.
Nothing means anything, inherently.
The apparently, aberrant things are not truly errant things
You simply create what you cogitate and
Replicate on that which you meditate.
So if you medicate upon predicates and prejudice
You will produce a progeny full of problematic pallor.
Nothing means anything,
Thus something means everything to some being, somewhere.

bryce