After a night of good memeing, I woke up with my brain cells realigned.
And I reached a conclusion about……what people are doing.
Even about the very nature of what I am trying to do.
And I also became extremely proud of myself,
for having an original take on how to try to be a good person.
What gives a person a sense
as though they are in the right place?
That they have become valuable, that their dreams matter?
Well, we can agree, that it is probably a combination of self-interest, altruism, and animal desires being fulfilled.
But what makes a person think they’re on the right track?
What makes a person light up?
What makes someone so very hard to change?
I think the best metaphor is the feeling you get
when you turn on a Christmas tree despite having a faulty setup.
Or, you know, some kind of……magnificently freaky holiday decoration setup….
where the lights aren’t quite organized, where the circuitry is possibly dangerous, where laws about energy usage may be violated, and which other neighbors might even be appalled by.
Yes, what makes you really shine, that thing, I want you to be in touch with.
I’ll sum it up in four words, unlike the me that has been struggling to communicate his ideas for so very long.
People are guided by this:
Imperfect connections breeding possibilities.
People aren’t most proud of a properly slacked wire, or a neatly trimmed hedge, or a symmetrical star on their tree, or buying the most popular decorations.
They are proud of the weird decorations, the tangled lights, the crooked star, the bush stuffed with tchotchkes.
Inside of an endearingly messy front yard, is the essence of a person actually managing to birth their deepest dreams, proof of humble struggles, evidence of appreciation for festivity.
This is my light show, my explosion of ingenuity, to call attention to what it is that makes us feel as though we are loving geniuses.
I’m accusing myself of being a billion times smarter than anyone else….and of anyone else being a million times smarter than they think they are.
Are you ready……to understand human nature at last?
The dubious accusation of crime or malice.
The barely deserved affection for any small efforts.
The infinite rage toward stuff you like preferences that don’t seem to affect your own.
The love of ethical leaders who have only proven to be vaguely useful.
Why are these feelings so strong?
I’m sure all four of these things you have strong opinions about, depending on which crime, which act of kindness, which movie, which politician.
All four of these things are example of connections which people know are faulty.
They are all like lights plugged in so innovatively and obscenely.
People know that, especially as adults, that you can’t simply try to be a good person and expect things to work out. Or even feel satisfied with yourself.
It’s like trying to follow a handbook on how to set up decorations….
when your house is far too weirdly shaped.
In order to navigate the possibilities in your life…
in order for your dream of “I am great and I am nice” to actually survive
to be able to feel your own light glow,
to be able to bring color into anyone else’s life,
you have to do things in a way that feels rather crude and ugly.
And having done that, you hug your accomplishments and feel massive affection for yourself.
Every time you try to change someone’s beliefs,
you’re not dealing with soldiers guarding a gate.
When you try to tell someone they’re evil or undignified or useless or just plain mediocre
you’re trying to fight an army of silly animatronic decorations
on a poorly built staircase with wreathes and ornaments arranged to fit on those ugly ramps.
How many times…..are you going to try and change someone
without ever connecting the punch to the face of an opinion?
It’s just like that nightmare where the hits never land.
You know it’s not happening.
It’s not working.
Every time you post, you can feel some kind of weird mediocrity to your actions.
Internet arguments can change people
but I know you can feel it’s NOT WORKING.
We all see that game, but only people like me have come close to explaining what that game is.
We’re all trying to play the same game of making other people feel like fools
when they already feel like fools, but those who find ways to GET SHIT DONE.
You’re trying to make other people feel weak and incompetent
when they already know what it means to OVERCOME AND ADAPT to so much great futility they have.
All of these deep philosophical arguments go and on and on,
and the desire for people to be nice to each other doesn’t fucking change.
That desire gets so ugly in its need to feel like it matters despite how hard it is
to feel dignified when you have to live up the standards of others.
And so people act like wizards doing magic,
shooting gentle-feeling amounts of blame over here,
firing blasts of imperfect shame over there,
feeling metaphysical but really only making loose linkage among actions,
hoping that other people sprout into a kind person just like them,
who can never really judge anything in an ideal way,
but who feel their own sense of worth manage to breathe,
because the circuits in their head say “from a fragmented but unified reality
I can make being nice absurdly step into the future.”
The social spellcasting we do hurts so many people.
We praise the blame that we don’t care leads to shame, because it embodies the possibility of people changing their own kindness.
We blame the praise that we see leads to arrogance, because it enables the birth of someone else’s well intentioned confidence.
We blame the civil-acting blame in others because it feels like a corruption of who should be praised.
We praise the borderline moronic-acting praise in others because it feels like supercharging kindness.
Maybe now you see a little more clearly how likely is it is to become loveable or hateable with little room in between.
The circuitry of what desires and dreams to egregiously back
for the sake of becoming so very viable beyond mere hopes.
We make deep arguments about who should do what in which situation
that we know can’t really become highly valuable guides to being human,
but that we can feel really changing how others dream of being socially decent,
satisfying that hot urge between your eyes when purposes and results seem to be melding.
The belligerent clusterfucks we are likely to become
that feel so heartwarmingly neat and useful feeling,
are so very guaranteed to piss off and heartwarm millions at once.
If you don’t believe my theory, let me beg you this-
peace won’t come until we can solve the thin line between asshole and badass.
That’s the issue that needs to be solved!
You can change so few things and badass and asshole become each other.
Polarization has a logic to it,
and it has to do with how eager we are to attach and detach actions and people
in a way that seems so very fitting to our own dream of being nice.
And in this chore of connecting things to things,
and carefully detangling wires and filtering out some circuitry,
we look at our approach to trying to be nice and say, “this feels pretty epic”.
But because it’s not easy to connect anything the right way,
or know which social strategies to avoid or not,
we often become like houses set on fire thanks to faulty electronics.
One person declaring, “how shameful you reckless wretch”,
and the other, I am not ashamed at trying to be beautiful,
and the stories make the headlines,
while we tell giant epics about motherfucking risk-making fate-benders who can be both shameful and dignified in the hopes they might guide us to better kindness.
My philosophy, my discovery, the found emotion, is the embodiment of what you find so very sweet and savory in the types of well-intentioned traitors in fictional stories.
When you see the mole come out after 10 years in hiding, why does that set you on fire?
The most hateable and loveable ways that people can be
are such because they embody
the desire to fulfill results without the need for proper feeling intentions.
You can’t allocate blame or praise in a proper quantity, you never could. But you still want to find how much to give. That’s what makes our hearts yearn for villains be villainous, but still lose to the general peace-loving public. They want to bend where people should allocate value in life and effort.
Our motivation, as people, as a collective, has never been to be perfect, nor could it ever have been. Our desires our too big for that, society requires too many resources for that, space and time itself may make any ideal moral alignment not possible. Even dogmatic people believe there are many contradicting ways to be a good person! How else would you build a civilization?
Our motivation as humans is to align things outside of us
just so ridiculously and fabulously
that our inner child
that just wants to be seen as decent
manages to feel warm.
The key to a peaceful world is not something that bizarre, because it’s an ability you already have- the power to see when people are crafting results out of purposes.
I see it already in so many people- the power to navigate social situations with both drives and standards. We are very proud of this, and this is our biggest friend and enemy.
Just look at what lies between goals and actions-
the making of very strange disconnections and connections
involving people, events, actions, and results
so that the light you want can shine so fiercely
rather than failing to make it through the powerlines.
Everyone is putting on that show, and we only need to see it for what it is
to make the final adjustments.
I dream of a new stage of civilization,
where we can look into each other’s eyes and see what we are trying to do each other!
You could call it considerate exploitation,
detached-feeling editing and altering of someone else,
which can be so very gentle-feeling or duplicitous,
but is most often, just trying to get by,
just what you do when you go to the grocery store.
In the world I dream of, my very average and normal philosophy,
is responsible for changing things in ways we were already creating the potential to happen.
Have a cup of hot chocolate, will you?
____
Now, 10 things you will see differently after reading this. Contradictions unwrapped like golden holiday gifts.
1. Comedy both massages and encourages the will do things in just the wrong way.
2. Love validates and gives modesty to the urge to connect indulgently to other people.
3. The creation of art violates and enhances the will to make things properly.
4. Government is endearing because control and lack of control over other people are always imperfectly linked.
5. Storytelling is popular because description and prescription belong together but cannot fuse together.
6. Fear is never either for something’s qualities or what it it does, but people who exploit that are creepy because they can make possibilities based on your feelings.
7. Work is never totally fulfilling or not, which is why employers feel comfortable with they shit they do that barely seems decent. They are always being exploited by someone else too, and workers and always gaining something.
8. Getting and receiving presents is fun, because we can feel the imperfect value of any action being used creatively.
9. Holiday myths encourage other people to always remember to bit a ridiculous when trying to be a good person.
10. Christmas commercials are fucking great because corporate greed is never separated from the desire to be charitable. Giving and getting by giving or getting…..that’s the game!
HAVE A GREAT FUCKING HOLIDAY
I KNOW I FEEL LIKE A FUCKING CHRISTMAS HOUSE
AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU??
IS THIS THE MOMENT WHERE I GET TO FEEL LIKE THE OPRAH OF THE INTERNET??
ARE YOU READY TO CHANGE THE ENTIRE WARUDO?
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 