(Critical) thought and action terminating clichés embedded in culture, some intentionally and some naturally
There are behaviors and thought patterns you can promote that influence elections aside from political agency through promotional information
The point of education – self-expression and formation of personal ideology
I want to give voice and articulate struggle and the ways in which we are splayed open and systematically discouraged and displaced from our humanity and collective responsibility to life and to each other
So one unconsciously possesses an ideal of what life should be like and I personally would like to try living that way for a week while writing actively the whole time to help myself do it and at the end debriefing and thinking about my ideals and goals and routines and limitations honestly to arrive at a new practice for myself. I have been instinctually brilliant (and super humble, evidently) in seeing elements of revolutionary struggle for myself while existing in a very privileged position which may legitimately be harmed by acting to better society; (although one must critically examine one’s media consumption given the existence of algorithms designed by corporations and wonder whether there is much or any agency in my direction, even if the only thing the algorithm did was automatically sag and familiarize itself to my existing psyche, even when I wasn’t paying attention) this is of course a fundamental mechanism of preventing revolution. I am fixated on the problem of the profit motive, and am imagining a solution integrating a number of attached motives and aims and values that are then embodied by a state with power to investigate, debate the acceptability of, and potentially end the existence or practice of a technology, including sale/design of objects, methods of business practice, etc.. There are so many obvious ills that deserve contemplation by groups genuinely motivated to improve the human experience, not just accrue profit. The uncritical values of wealth (‘abundance’), ease, convenience, passivity and the sort of lazy hypocritical suspicion of intrusion and manipulation by ‘other’ cultivated carefully to ignore the total intrusion and manipulation at the hands of capital; it seems so difficult to animate change given the current state of information ownership/dissemination/reception. The act of beginning to understand the dialectic of images and reality, to articulate the sea of images that one swims through to arrive at personal purpose or act at all, is a choice to try to become more human. I failed to take full advantage of my college experience, but I seriously want a chance at seriously making a statement and affecting change, something that I – rather uncritically – have accepted to involve me acquiring more education, more shiny pebbles (and also undeniably meaningful, humanizing, emboldening moments that enabled this sort of self expression in the first place, lost due to the fundamental orientation of values in American society) to show to the public and next pulpit-owner; but this is a sad practice and aim in certain ways, a man running from his insecurity and internal insolvency to try to become big enough in the – a – world to compensate for the misery of my daily experience, in certain ways not understanding that mending that misery and moving honestly is the only way to actually make my dreams come true, if occasionally by changing what those dreams are when it emerges they are impractical and harmful and derived as a form of self defense. I want to create art that captures these structural critiques and observations and communicates them to the public at large, that elucidates a novel set of values fundamentally different from the profit motive underlying our entire society. I want to examine things like personhood (‘humanity’), sex, power, etc.; I want to combine these themes intentionally and think about their interplay, set in a variety of contexts; I want to create demonstrative stories about wealth and its effect on human possibility, setting people of different socioeconomic groups in the same situation and demonstrating the unique struggles that they have due to their identity and vitally their wealth, power, and agency; about the fact that there are those who manage capitalism who are liberated from the negative consequences of this system and exist in unacceptable ways, and that society becomes something for them to engage with almost as if it were in slow motion, plundered and played with and used vicariously in one’s quest for personal expression that, undertaken with the set of priorities of the average american, can never be wholly successful and will always breed misery universally; that there is a public ‘thing,’ a res publica, that needs to be tended to and fostered and critically thought about and promoted, values beyond just individual abundance but individual and cultural expression and dignity, priorities that need to be adapted and fundamental expectations that must be changed. And yet I am still dancing on the outside of the circle here, saying ‘I want to write’ instead of writing, even as this piece of writing is produced it represents the bones of what should be written or what I want to write. Side note, I am wildly unwell physically and it is a struggle that I have been attempting to not consider even though it, as part of the collection of sensations I am having, constitutes my lived experience, and even as I deny so much of what is real and human about myself I cannot winnow illness
If I were the government in its current ideological state I’d use blackmail to have a roster of “unconnected” dangerous people to commit serious crimes like assassinating leaders who threaten the status quo because their operations which are currently not being investigated; If I were a football team I’d also cultivate a class of bruiser football players meant to injure opposing star players (this is impractical and actively stupidly cruel, to say nothing of the idea above); that one would likely find these suggestions ignominious implies and gives some shape to the cultural practice and public expectations of these institutions, as Machiavelli could be seen to reveal something about the ideals of princehood in his rendering a negative of sorts (one not necessarily opposite of reality but uncanny and naked and too honest about its purposes, in a way that was immediately revealing about the substance of the activity of rulership itself), yet we fail to acknowledge that those operating vital systems think and move in downright horrifying ways to maintain and accumulate more capital and power, and had to think and move in horrifying ways to get to that position in the first place.
I live in a state of perpetual lack and it is nearly entirely unnecessary; I don’t know why I don’t seem to recognize the possibility of having multiple sets of towels / dishes / silverware / pants so that I am not constantly running out
I also, in order to facilitate that, need a consistent schedule of house maintenance, something that doesn’t happen because my little splayed open oblivion world has avenues through which I can acquire things to effectively permanently perpetuate my self-imposed status that is almost like living under house arrest with a hoarder who is me in my careless apathetic self hating state. This is dangerous and must be broken free of.
“Blow as deep as you want to blow” – this is blowing pretty deep
And while on one level this is another form of avoidance, it is about as confrontational of my issues as can be; there is so much not being said and – critically – done. There is so much in the kaleidoscopic fullness of humanity not being embodied by my human experience, so much of me not touched by my own mind for a long time out of fear of vulnerability and a sort of existentially-embodied scowl at the world and times. But the world and times are what they are; power is acting in the world and on me, and I can either make a sincere effort and augment my own humanity or not, and still have to drag myself to work whether it’s an anonymous office job or something that I feel more happy about. That is to say, as the Stoics expressed (Marcus Aurelius specifically), I would prefer to run alongside the cart than be dragged, to express my humanity, autonomy, and vision as best I can and find out, for better or worse, what I can do.
And how much of this voice, this tone, this worldview really reaches a reader? How does it sit in their mind, does it appear cogent? Does it have the power and context necessary to change somebody’s mind? And how much is my voice really here; am I performing my intelligence in an insecure way that jumps off the page? I have a great fear of being stuck in a goldfish bowl of ‘insight’ that never goes anywhere which is clear to any observer but not to myself, and that nobody is honest or direct enough to tell me just how off base I am. In my long bouts of thinking and writing recently I have really felt like I am onto something, but I wonder how much this effort is something on this level of supreme confidence and perfectionism? This doubt is more about the way I’m recording and presenting my opinion and thought pattern, becoming open to psychoanalysis and leaving all sorts of characteristic little indicators which are telling about the human creating the thought. A LOT of my position about self improvement is based in comprehension that began for me several years ago with Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly, along with Atomic Habits. These two popular books are couched in ideology – as everything is – and incite people to act according to sets of values which are only implicitly set out (because they emanate from the creator of the work on a semi-intentional level), a set of values that include work and ‘normalcy,’ even as Brown does acknowledge and try to eliminate the toxic elements of that value; they also do not ask effective questions about class/logistical limitations to self transformation. And I, embarrassingly, feel that I haven’t read enough total material to have a consistent read on my relationship with a text and really know for certain if I am being shown a clear picture or not. One danger of AI (here’s the once-a-day shaking of my fist at the sky) is the creation of context and source material soup that warps existing ideas and deprives one of clarity about where something came from, a question we ask so rarely given the way that the internet works and is structured that it is very hard to begin meaningful transformation.
B Writes 