Monday, September 29, 2008

The art of compensation.

The art of compensation.

Today I’m writing about what I call the latent and the surface functions of interaction. This can also be referred to as the art of compensation. The reason it’s referred to as compensating is because we’re all insecure about things from our past experiences in life, so we live in denial of them. It’s the denial of pain that allows us to become consciously productive, or consciousness of what’s produced without seeing what’s driving it. We move this pain or feeling of powerlessness into the subconscious so we don’t have to deal with it. The fact is most people can’t deal with it or they’d kill themselves. Those who embrace it use it as a force to create art and music, but this allows the art and music to actually become the façade that conceals the interactions taking place around it. Just like religion has a sacred and a profane, the art and music becomes a sacred ritual that we revolve our lives around to compensate for the fact that in our lives outside of these activities we live painful lives where we feel powerless. This makes art and music the surface function and it’s driven by the latent function of the pain of everyday life. In everyday life however we act happy in our interactions with others even though we’re subconsciously insecure about our hidden pain and powerlessness in life. When away from people we use this pain to create outlets for it.

Another example is a girl I was talking to at school who said she wanted a child at twenty-one. The details of the debate that took place between her and I about why she should or shouldn’t want that at her age aren’t relevant. The reason is because the concepts in the debate were really a surface function. The latent function was the fact she could get me to argue with her. The latent function I would argue is the real function or purpose of why we do things. Surface functions are abstractions of ideas we use to cover the true functions driving our motives. Our entire lives are denial of the latent functions driving us in many cases. What I would say about this girl because I know her fairly well at this point is that she never had a close relationship with her father, who never taught her how to interact with men, and he never gave her guidelines about how to love or date a man. Without prior guidance she is left to figure it out on her own, and going to a Catholic all girls school before college didn’t help. Her true insecurity is that she desires a man in her life, but doesn’t understand what those who went to public schools would equate with certain cultural norms of what should be part of a relationship. What she has learned is that arguing for the sake of arguing without actually having a point to make allows men to pay attention to her, because men easily want to assert themselves when confronted. The reason there isn’t a point to make or logic that follows through in her arguments is because arguing is the point, because it gives her attention she doesn’t know how to get from the opposite sex otherwise.

When someone picks up an instrument because they want to get good at it, and they say it’s because playing makes them happy, it’s really their denial of the latent function driving them to play. Nobody performs an action in and of itself, but for the ability to get something else. Everything in life is overlapping, and in a constant stage of becoming, so anything done isn’t because it’s good in itself. The real reason for playing an instrument is to compensate for the fact we can’t communicate well, or aren’t popular places we’d like to be. Playing the instrument allows us to gain a skill we can use to make friends or become more popular. We want people to recognize us for something we can do well that they can’t, because the thing we were never able to do was be accepted for what we originally were upon confrontation. This causes a process that forces us to become something other than we already were. This process is happening through our entire lives, because we’re constantly living with the struggle of acceptance by others in each new phase we enter in life.

The reason there can’t be free will is because we can’t will something from nothing. We don’t create a will that desires freely to have an outcome. We have conscious desires, but the will driving them is subconscious. We have a will, but this will is forged by a world we’re thrown into that is already in motion and has a structure. Our only choice is to react to what already exists. What we choose is to embrace what is possible as a reaction to what we don’t see as possible. We compensate for what isn’t possible by living in denial of desiring it. What we desire that we can’t have is the pain powerlessness of life that causes us to run toward the productive thing that compensates for it. Nietzsche makes this point evident when speaking of the Jews living in slavery for so many years. They couldn’t have what their maters had, so they embraced a world and religion that revolved around righteousness by being without those things. Nobody is completely secure with themselves and it’s because of this everyone is compensating for all their past experiences of pain in an attempt to make up for them. All will is a reaction to prior experiences. The compilation of prior experiences in the subconscious cause us to act out options in our present based on whether they remind of something that felt good or bad.

If we trace back the phenomenology of desire we’d find that all present decisions came about because of people more than things. Things are just reflections of people from the past we use to represent them in our current lives. Things can be objects and/or activities we take part in. The reason we perform things in the present is to fuse the horizons of those we desire to accept us in the present with those we cared about in the past. To care can be in a positive or negative form. To love or hate someone are both forms of caring that drive us to action. The next reason we don’t have free will is because of our ability to care. We don’t have to the capability to stop caring about people, and for the same reason don’t have the ability to stop caring about things, which are reactions performed to gain acceptance by people, or get others to care who hadn’t prior in positive or negative manners. These actions of love and hate carry over into our current lives. When we perform an action in the present and say we’re doing so by our free will because this will feel good or be productive, it isn’t really by our free choosing, but because it compensates for all the people we used to care about in the past that aren’t in the present, in relation to those who are in the present. Actions aren’t actions in themselves for the sake of our willing them, but reactions shaped by experiences with people we cared about that reflect them in our present lives. An action ties experiences with person A from the past to Person B in the present. We are always holding person B in relation to person A without realizing it; because person A lives within us in the form of action and speech we perform by mimicking them. The actions look like things and actions, but they’re really all the people from our past inside us interacting with those in our present, which is constantly forging us into another person once again, because we’re always becoming new people through new people.

The ability to care about a thing like playing an instrument therefore isn’t to care about the instrument in and of itself, but because it reminds us subconsciously of someone we liked being around or admired, and compensates for those we can’t be like or accepted by. All interaction is our ability to do what we became good at to compensate for all our failures with others in life. If we embraced our failures we’d put our expectations in places that couldn’t be reached. That would cause us to feel insignificant in our own lives instead of living in denial about what we’re bad at in the eyes of others. The most we can do is realize what is driving good parts by seeing their opposites. If we can at least realize our pain we can admit why we’re doing the productive things we do consciously. The ability to trace back our motives in the subconscious can sometimes allow us the ability to forgive ourselves and change our current actions, but there will always be bitterness driving something we aren’t aware of.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Is there a good life?

Is there a good life? Looking back at philosophy there's a strand of changes that take place over time. Starting with Greek philosophy there was a focus on virtue and a right way to live. If we could all just live the most virtuous life we'd have a good political system too. Is there a good political system? We'll always be convoluted by our present tense situation on this issue and see the world from our time and place in history. In order to see politics philosophically we would have to return back to the Greeks who first start with the question of what is a good life? If we can come to an understanding of how to live a good life then we can build a political concept around this instead of the other way around.

Modern philosophy starting with Machiavelli altered the way we look at political philosophy. The aim was no longer about how to live a good life with an aim towards virtue. Instead it was what will allow us the most freedom. With the belief in mind that everyone is self interested and doesn't care about what is good; the aim became instead to focus on what will let people have the most freedom and what is the least pain we need to put them through in order to let them achieve this? Another way of saying this is what can we do to attain the virtue of a stable political system through will and force?

This modern line of thought hasn't really changed ever since. Machiavelli turned political philosophy into a science/philosophy and from here on things have gone this direction. In time science and philosophy branched off in their different directions and now we have political science. Hobbes took a similar position to Machiavelli that people are selfish, but this time the focus wasn't on virtue as much as power and the main goal being survival in a world without civil society. Locke changed the focus from survival in a world of all against all to food coming from property. Rousseau comes about with the idea that civil society has reached a stage similar to the Greeks and starts the Romantic Movement, but the difference is it's still a focus on freedom and allowing the most stability instead of what is good and a good life. Nietzsche starts what is now post modernism to an extent and now we have a belief that everything is relative to a time and place. There is no right or wrong anymore. Even morals are relative and subjective to where we are in history.

This is quite a transition that has taken place from a world where there must be a good and right way to live to one where everything is relative and there are no objective truths. We are the product of this line of thought. When we in democracy look at other governments we believe they should be democracies. Is democracy really the best form of government? If things are really relative I'd argue that it isn't because it depends on where we are in the world and at what time. People in the middle ages desired monarchy and thought it was the best form of government at the time. As long as the monarch treated citizens as they felt was up to standard they wouldn't revolt. Some countries have stable systems as they now exist under monarchies. A big difference between Christianity and Muslims is Christians see their religion as a part of their life and Muslims their religion as a way of life, so even their economy and political system has to coincide with the religion. Perhaps these people are better off under monarchies. There are also a number of structural transitions that must take place in order for democracy to happen in most systems. First of all industrialization seems to create the backbone for allowing democracy to exist as a luxury good. When a economic system gets to a certain complexity it makes it so everyone must become more educated in order to run the bureaucracy of an industrial society. More education leads to a questioning over the rights one has over their lives and so on. This doesn't always coincide however when your religion is your complex economic system all the time, and many Muslim countries are very advanced.

Another thing is not all religions are the same…even if they claim to be the same religion. If we go to Southeast Asia we find Indonesia to be the most populated Muslim country in the world, but their practices are slightly different. Before Muslims came to these countries there were mostly Buddhists and animists that became mixed with Muslim ideas over time, so it's a much more mystical form of Islam that can lean more democratic. What is good is therefore best described by experience. All the things we experience beyond the senses are really just reflections of other people's explanations of their experiences through our own senses. We see the world not only through the lens of what we live, but our interpretation of history, right and wrong, and a good system, are based on our experiences with the history and explanation of the experiences others had before us. Is there a good life or is it just based on what we think must be the best way to live?

I'd like to say I think we lost something with the Greeks. We can all have political thought, but aren't all politically philosophical, but those who are philosophical can have philosophical political thought. It's not till we figure out how to live well that we can figure out how to have a good system to live in. Our character is shaped by our ability to adapt to experience. The form of a government adapts to the actions of the people. Just because we can adapt to a way of surviving with those around us doesn't mean we're actually living a good life, because the people around us might not actually be living good lives and we adapt to be like them in order to survive, but why do we want to just survive? Plato would say what most people see is only a reflection of the good. I suppose an example in modern day is social networking and TV. What we see on TV is what looks appealing, but if actually lived out may not be good. If you look at something like MySpace you'll notice nobody ever puts depressing pictures of their lives up. Everyone is showing a reflection and projecting what make their life look appealing, fun, and good. In many cases we can be led astray from a good life by going after a life that looks appealing and then finding we're trapped trying to survive rather than flourish. I suppose my next point would then be how do we find what allows us to have a good life?

Most of my philosophies come down to three elements. They are physical experience, language, and emotions. Physical experience and emotions are given to us by nature. We naturally interact without environments toward what feels good. Language as a later development helps shape our character, where the former two are the essence given to us. If there is an essence given to us by nature then this would be the good. Words are only used to describe what is good in the form of lexicons. All language beyond lexicons is artificial language. These are words made up to describe things that we didn't naturally experience in nature such as abstract ideas or physical human inventions. The artificial language is what can deceive us, because it causes us to try rationalizing what is a good way to live instead of knowing through physical experience and following our emotions. Artificial language creates a world of abstract intentions we think we'd like, but may find ourselves not acting on when in actual situations. I suppose you could say my philosophy is for slightly older to people to an extent. The reason is because young people are supposed to do "stupid" things. They supposed to try and experience what feels good in life and learn from what they see as mistakes. So, what I'm writing may be more applicable to people moving out of their 20's and beyond. First because we've been able to get most of those other foolish experiences out of the way in order to move towards a good life, and second because we're in a position to prime the next generation of youth toward a good life.

The reason priming is so important is because even though young people will still try all the things they will anyway, we need to plant seeds in their heads by setting examples. When they see you are stable and doing well they'll desire to be more like you someday. It's almost a boomerang effect where we prime young people to think a certain way while they're young. When they become teenagers we let them do as they please with less restrictions, and never force young people to be like us, but give them incentive by acting the way we think is right and making the choice to do the right thing easier to grasp in their environment. For example we can tell them its ok to eat junk food, but the house will only have non-junk food. We aren't limiting desire through force, but we are making it easier to choose healthy options. The boomerang tends to come back as they get older and next thing they know they start to take on many of the characteristics of the parents. The problem then becomes are the parents living a good life?

I think most important thing to define a good life is what will bring the most long term rewards compared to what will be the most fleeting and short term rewards. Ben Franklin even said it's more important to live well than to live long. To live well in many cases allows most people to live long. All structures exist within larger structures, or all institutions exist within larger institutions. The institution of the family is in the community. The community exists in civil society. Most institutions exist within civil society including culture. The only institution standing next to civil society these days is the state. The state and civil society exist relative to other societies within a world structure, and this is exists in a universal structure. There must be something that transcends universally over time to all cultures that allows a good life. My belief is this thing is nature, which first started with the ability to survive by cooperating with each other by finding what we had in common as a struggle. When we started creating artificial structures away from nature our essence remained the same, but our character had to adapt. Our essence was for things of survival like food, shelter, and sexual reproduction. In civil society these basic needs are met, so a good life is no longer about just being able to survive. That means the essence of a good life isn't food, shelter, and sex. These are just for survival. I also add in drugs because there are some drugs given to us by nature that were used for religious ceremonies in order to celebrate the community of life. These things transcend and seem to be cornerstones for moving out of survival, but the thing that transcends from nature to civil society is stability and a feeling of control. The purpose of building a civil society is then to have a greater feeling of these things than nature could provide us with.

A good life moves beyond our survival desires to desires of ritual, but even ritual can exits to either pass time or give a feeling of accomplishment. The things given to us by nature only exist to make us pass time now, because our new characters had to adapt civil society, and a good character in a civil society is one that can replace the character of a person in nature excluding the redundant and keeping the stable aspects. The ritual in nature was the ritual of survival through the things nature gave us. When these things are met the ritual must become the next step up. A natural ritual is one that allows a person to exist as long and as well as possible in nature. A ritual in civil society is one that can help us live well and possibly long too. The things of nature instead become a burden, because since the character of society and government changed, the abundance of these things does more harm than good from nature if we chase them the same as we did in nature. Now we have to moderate our nature to make more room for the rituals that make us live well. Since most of us are victims of the structure we live in, the question then becomes, is the government and society we're living in one that allows us to live well when we physically interact with our environment, priorities through cultural language, and emotional interactions? If we want emotional stability that nature intended through those we care about, we also need a physical environment as nature wanted to live in that is stable. If we can mimic the right things from nature in the physical structure of our artificial environments, we can have the most stable society where we exist in time and history. The only way to get this is through experience in our time, and not just based on our view of other or prior societies, but through the eyes of our own in our own experience in our own life. I have a ways to go in addressing this, because only those who can live well that should set the standard for all others, but they only get here through experience. Therefore, how can we give people the incentive to have the best experiences more often to eventually allow them to act in a way that makes the best life and government for them as a culture?

Monday, September 8, 2008

The paradox of power.


The principal of least interest is a power concept in communication used to point out who is in a dominant position versus a subordinate position in an interaction between two people. The way this concept works is fairly simple. Wal-Mart is a large corporation that has numerous options to choose from when it comes to suppliers. Wal-Mart can therefore be picky about who it wants to buy supplies from. The suppliers of the world on the other hand (the smaller they are), are desperate to sell their products on the market and Wal-Mart can even make them sell lower than they normally would just to make some money by the supplier. The supplier will lower their standards of worth just so they can sell something. If they don't they'll be turned down by another company willing to do it for less. In sense all these suppliers are desperate to sell and Wal-Mart is easily capable of buying as it chooses. Wal-Mart has the power because it has the least interest in each individual supplier due to the fact it has options.

Another example closer to home in our everyday lives would be someone attractive and charismatic due to cultural and temporal standards. So, we have a person who people would really like to date because they seem very desirable based on aesthetic qualities like good physical appearance and/or charisma. This person has many options to date as they please and don't care for a deep commitment to anyone for long because they always have the ability to have more options. The rational approach to counteract this is to realize first that they have less interest in us than we do in them. The next step would be to create the illusion that we are less interested in them than they are in us. This makes us mysterious in a sense and they suddenly call more, and we have to make sure not to call back more than they call us in order to seem less desperate. This eventually gives us more power, because we've played our power card so they desire us as much as we did them and eventually we're on the same playing field. From here we can hope they develop emotional attachments on some level and want us as much as we wanted them.

What I just summarized is the rational approach to dealing with someone we desire that doesn't desire us as much as we do them. It's no surprise that attractive women (in my culture) tend to end up with bad boy/assholes in many cases, but the reason is because these men really don't think all this through the way I outlined in the rational approach. These men are just being themselves. Only a man who really cares would rationalize all these things I outlined and that means he's not a bad boy and he's trying to play out the principal of least interest in his favor. The bad boy would actually be happier with the attractive club girl because he doesn't care anymore than she does. The truth is however neither of them is very happy in their relationships and interactions overall because they're both emotionally broken on some level (can't find emotional stability). Taking this a little further I'll point out that this is the most extreme version of two people. People can play these games at several levels, and attraction can vary as well as "bad boyness". So, let's just say we all play variations of this on several levels.

In my last writing I spoke of the power paradox, which is a concept I came up with to point out the flaw in the principal of least interest. Basically, the rational actor is seeking to maximize their benefit by playing all the loopholes around the person who cares less. By doing this they can eventually get them to want them back. However, this power paradox I point out is that the rational actor has over rationalized a desire that may not have been that important to begin with or in their interest. In doing so the rational actor has manipulated their own actions and personality into one that isn't their own in hopes of achieving someone who doesn't really like the true them for who they are. The thing to question isn't how to get this person I want, but why do I want this, and is this really going to make me happy if I get it?

There are two points I'd like to bring up in why we may desire such a thing in the first place. Both of them have to do with what shapes our thoughts. They are history and language. In history we have the late nineteenth century creation of sexology that took all the forms of sodomy and categorized them while defining their purposes and drives. After this we had Freudian ideas that taught us that sex drives everything we do. Finally we have evolutionary psychology that teaches us everything comes from the drive for either reproduction or survival. This history of ideas shapes our thoughts to believe we should seek out sex as the center of interactions and even those that aren't directly sexual are due to some kind of competition over what people who aren't sexually attracted to each other will battle over. The problem I have with these ideas is they've taken our humanity and categorized it, while putting precedence on certain motives. Do we desire these because they existed and the sciences discovered them, or do we desire them because the sciences invented them and told us they existed? I won't deny there are sexual tendencies, but I believe they exist as part of a far more complex series of things that make us who we are. I believe sex is accompanied by feelings of emotional attraction and a desire for happiness and emotional stability with the people we are drawn toward, and not just a feeling of getting off to reproduce for the species. Sex is just one of many drives drawing us toward other people and all those other things accompanying it are so complex we may never find them all out, but it's the teaching of sex being at the center that makes us act on it as so.

In language we find that the meaning given to words allows a distinction between those we're attracted to with certain priorities over others in some situations. For example when we make new friends, we don't meet someone, exchange numbers, talk a few times, and then ask for the label of friendship. We usually find that we manage to run into someone regularly in the same places we like to hang out and hang out together more and more till suddenly we find we're acting out things friends do. After a while we look back and start asking when did we meet, and when did we become friends? In a dating mentality however, we meet someone, exchange numbers, talk a few times, and after a few dates see if we can be something special with a label like boyfriend/girlfriend. This brings me to the point that the principal of least interest is only capable of coming about, because we're first taught some people are primarily just for sex, and secondly that we have to label them as relationship or not relationship. We have an interest in making them something because we've been taught to desire them a certain way already, and if we can't have that way we start trying to rationalize how to get it. The problem then becomes, can we escape historical meanings of words and categories? If I give you a rose, has passion not already been ingrained into the rose's meaning? I can't take the meaning out of the rose because culture already agreed to put it there and I as an individual can't take it out in my lifetime.

The only options we have left when seeing there's no way of removing already made meanings of things on our own, and that rationalizing our power will only lead to a paradox of it, is to not give the rose if it feels wrong to give the rose. If my rose won't be accepted as special because you already get them from so many others then I just won't give it to you. You may come begging for my rose if I gave you one before and won't now, but as soon as I see that I'm just another option instead of special, there's no reason to waste my roses here anymore. The reason is because I don't need to desire something just because I was taught to if it makes me feel bad. If it makes me feel bad once after we already shared a comfortable experience there's nothing left to share, because this is already turning into a game of power struggle. My desires only need to go places they make me feel good and wanted by my interactions. If friendship makes us feel good and the label develops itself then friendship should be our primary goal and not sex or a relationship. Those things can come after people prove their friendship.

What we find is there doesn't need to be a paradox. We are either cells of the same organ or we aren't. Those who exist within the group that take care of each other will be given the respect of the group. To speak at a more political level when referring to large corporations, it's not till the suppliers who can respect each other mutually and want each other the same can merge at levels that make them greater, that they can start having more say of what the corporations of finished goods request of them. We're in an age of globalization, and many newly developed countries are trying to take steps to keep from being exploited by cutting themselves off from trade. At the same time the most developed countries citizens don't want to open their borders to immigration, freer trade, and expanding monetary systems. I believe we can't stop the inevitable and instead of trying to hold back, we need to push forward harder the thing that will happen anyway, which is regionalization of continents. The countries that border each other should care the most about each other, and consolidate their resources and economies. Instead of trying to keep each other out, we need to let each other in. It's not until this happens that suppliers will consolidate as well as corporations more perhaps. It was because of globalization that industrial jobs started moving from the United States elsewhere, and when the workers of the world try to create unions they're shut down because these corporations can just move again to other countries. If we move forward toward the inevitable, and people have to work under these larger consolidated systems it unites the workers of the world too, because these companies will no longer be able to run to the next country if most of them are regionalized into economic unions. If the world comes down to a few economic unions, all the workers within those unions can work together to unionize themselves finally, because they mutually respect one another and as workers and will all have the power to create a club big enough to balance against the giants that have nowhere else to run.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Ritual as a way of life.

There's a big difference between intention and choice. Most of us would like to think what we choose is what we intended, but what really seems to occur is we choose things we don't intend, and then convince ourselves what we have in many cases is what we wanted. It's easy to distort the things we want for ourselves, and think we want from one another. The fact is what we choose is what we really wanted all along in a situation. Intentions are just abstractions of how we'd like our lives to be that aren't our true desires if choices are otherwise after we act.

The way we'd like things to be has to do with love more than anything else. Love precedes all situations. Some would like to say we're creatures of aggression, appetite, or self centered, and I won't deny these things, but I believe love precedes the existence of all. The reason is because in order to have any of those other things we first have to care about something. When we care about something we desire it to be part of our lives. So, we love something before we become selfish for it. It's only when we realize we can't have what we love that we become aggressive and appetitive for things the opposite of love. If I love you and realize you don't love me back I feel hate or disappointment. If I love someone or something that seems threatened by being taken away I become aggressive. We are all self centered in this world, but it's only because we love something first that we can center on it. Buddha claimed that we can get rid of suffering by getting rid of desire. I say we just need to love the right things if we really want to be happy.

The paradox of power is when we learn to gain control of something we end up manipulating ourselves in the process. I make this point with favorite example – dating. If we care about someone and want them to want us back, and say perhaps we've had experience with "the game" and learn how to manipulate others into being with us by not doing "stupid things" that turn them off, the only way we can do this is by changing the way we speak and act in order to fool them into liking us. What ends up happening in the process is we fool ourselves into being a different person and custom ourselves to fit others. When we finally have them in our lives we find they make us unhappy, because they never really suited us to begin with and now we're stuck being someone we didn't want to be in order to get here. If something feels wrong from the start, it will never end right. The best kind of power is doing what we love and not altering that to get who we love.

The sad truth is we all want to be loved, but don't really love others in general. To love and not be loved back is depression. To have love and have it threatened with leaving us or being taken is aggression and war. Love is really the love of what people can do for us primarily, and it's a good reason to always be on our guard when people who aren't friends talk to us, because anyone talking to us wants something we can give them and not us personally. Since we deceive ourselves with intention we are better able to deceive others, because we tell them we love them a certain way or for a certain reason and act out otherwise. The reason for this is intention and choice isn't the same thing. When we tell ourselves we want someone to love them as more than friends and then soon after leave them, our choice reflects we didn't want them, and really wanted something they could give us like validation to move forward in other areas of their lives. It's wise to always take our time in feeling people out so we don't do the wrong things to them before we realize why we're doing it. The other end of this is to build good reflexes and never be on your guard, because you've already developed habits that allow you to coast through life and deflect things that might harm you…kinda the way super Mario does with star power. If we can get in the habit of loving things that make us feel good all the time then we have the right desires. These things aren't primarily people but rituals to start with, and good rituals are virtues, while bad rituals are vices.

Even in ritual we gain feelings of control, but the paradox in ritual like anything else in life is that to gain control over something is the manipulate ourselves to that thing. This isn't such a bad thing though with rituals, because if you look at the meaning of life you'll find that it's actually nihilistic and without purpose. Everything we accomplish in life eventually just ends in death. I was Nietzsche that said "Genuine honesty, assuming that this is our virtue and we cannot get rid of it, we free spirits – well then, we will want to work on it with all the love and malice at our disposal, and not get tired of 'perfecting' ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have left: may its glory come to rest like a gilded, blue evening glow of mockery over this aging culture and its dull and dismal seriousness!" (Beyond Good and Evil P.227. I personally dislike Nietzsche's ideas in most cases and believe the complete opposite. A virtuous ritual is the best thing we can have in our lives because it keeps us sane. If life has no ultimate point in our time here anyway, then we should manipulate ourselves into doing what feels good on a regular basis. Anything that makes us feel bad within a ritual can't be that good overall and considered a vice. Obviously to overeat leads to bodily problems and pain later in life. To drink too much is to poison the body and give us a hangover, plus bad decisions while drunk, and bodily problems later in life as well. To sleep to much is to be inactive and a lack of ritual. To learn how to manipulate others in the game of dating is a ritual that doesn't teach us how to build long lasting relationship skills with people. We can learn how to live with friends while we're young and develop the same skills as living with a significant other, and avoid the drama and pain being taken from our youth by avoiding living with people we don't intend to marry.

A ritual can be religious as well as secular, but all rituals revolve around repetitive tasks. Life is a repetitive task too, because we're born, give birth, and die. Nature in general is a repetitive task to adapt to environments. If we want to feel good in environments we need to adapt the best tasks to those environments. One of the greatest rituals of course is to raise a child, because this is given to us straight from nature, and the repetition of care will make good adults of both of you. I personally am highly neurotic. That means if I'm not always doing something I get this nervous feeling of anxiety, and if I can't work on the thing I enjoy I become unhappy. Everyone is born with different levels of it, it's inherited genetically, and it goes down with age. Young people in general are more neurotic than adults, so listen up youngsters…haha…eh hem. Neuroticism is a double edged sword like power, or any other desire for control. If you know how to use your weapon properly it will only do good things for you, which is why I preach following what feels good in an environment, but even an environment can be a place of bad habits we adapt to. If we feel a conflict within an environment then we should seek out an environment that has things we'd really like in our heads, so we can surround ourselves by others more accommodating to the way we'd like to be. If you use your weapon wrong you'll get in habits of doing the thing over and over that gives you control over things that hurt you more than help you and create vices.

A ritual then is much like a story I heard of these men downtown working for the state digging a hole one day. In the morning my friend drives by to see one was digging a series of holes and the other was watching. In the evening my friend drives by again and sees the other guy filling in the holes. My friend pulls over and asks why they are doing this, and the answer is the guy who is supposed to put the trees in the ground called out for the day, but they continued to dig the holes and fill them in anyway. Pretend your life is the tree missing and all your doing is digging holes and filling them in around it. That's what a ritual is. The living thing at the center isn't really there in a sense. It is but it doesn't really matter, because this life is pointless. The only way to make it feel like our lives have meaning is to be creatures of action and act on desire. That's why Buddha is wrong. He believed we could just meditate desire away, but I say nurture it, because nature gave it to us for a reason. We shouldn't deny our nature but learn how to use our weapon properly. Nature gave us the ability to desire things, and even speech in itself was designed to potentially get things from other people we want. What we want then is to dig holes and fill them back in by acquiring skills and talents. We manipulate ourselves to get good at things, because to desire things that end will only leave us a new hole fill with a new thing in life. To dig a hole at something like playing sports however, gives us a ritual to keep chasing after and get better at. We never accumulate more sport. We just keep perfecting ourselves more at the sport. A ritual is something we manipulate ourselves to more than the activity itself. It feels good because it's something you don't get enough of, but it's also something you don't have to try and accumulate quantity of, and instead accumulate quality of ourselves in. The same can be said of learning and instrument or a language. The more rituals the better, because in the end rituals define us. When people ask who we are we say all our rituals, and in many cases start with the job we do each day. Since the job is for someone other than us most of the time, it doesn't define us as well as the ones we gain off the job for ourselves to share with others.

That's what leads to the point brought up near the beginning. We don't need to attempt manipulating others with power if we have skills, because others who have the same skills or skills that compliment will be attracted to us like oil in water. Cooperation always gives more power than manipulation, because neither party has to alter themselves as much when they already share enough things at the center. They can then both manipulate around what already existed before coming into each other's lives. The more we have rituals around people we like and come to agreements with, the more people we can do the redundant with, then we don't have to do the ritual alone anymore. It's primarily about getting good at things, but that's only the means. The end of ritual is actually to coexist better with people. To end with something humorous; I heard a man say he read a book about why men are better than women and claimed it was so true. The funny thing to me was even if this could be proven it doesn't change the fact we have to coexist with each other, and to believe I am better than you and try to benefit myself and/or manipulate you for that reason creates more instability and a loss of power due to a lack of cooperation in our everyday lives where we can both take what we're good at and trade the results each day.

Monday, September 1, 2008

The best morals are no morals.

If we had free will then it would mean we have some kind of moral responsibilities in life to act upon each day, because if we control our actions then it's up to us to do the right things. Since I claim we have no free will and things exist due to causalities, we have no moral obligations in life. The question would then arise that if we have no moral obligations how do we create stability, control, and security? My answer is that morality is already innate and therefore will create itself just by us acting out the things that our genetic and societal structures cause us to do. We don't choose what our values, beliefs, and motives are for doing things, because don't choose to care. Caring is an emotional state that precedes all those things. The same as we don't choose what people we do and don't want to care about, we also don't choose values, beliefs, and motives. We just care about something and it suddenly becomes a value, belief, or motive. The things we're taught to care about come from our environments. Anything that hasn't existed in our environment can't be cared about.

Since we're driven to act on the things we care about we should only do what feels good to us. As creatures of desire by nature and by that same nature are taught what to value socially by people we care about, we should all do what makes us feel good no matter what. The reasoning behind this is if what we do makes other people feel bad even if it makes us feel good it's only a matter of time before it makes them feel good to punch us, which makes us feel bad and then we stop doing that thing learning it doesn't feel good in the long term. It's only through experience that we learn what is right and wrong in our environments and that's where morals come from. We're hardwired to perform certain actions based on what our ancestors did for millions of years of experience before us. On a social level we're taught to act certain ways within a structure that we are rewarded and punished for in that environment that alters our behaviors starting at a young age. Every institution has its own sets of norms, values, beliefs, and motives. The things that manage to overlap most institutions are societal norms. The reason each institution has a different story is due to encoding and decoding of language. When one institution tells another what it expects as normal it's encoding information to us. From the institution we stand in we decode based on the angle we see what they're saying things from and hear it the way we want to. This is why we all have different desires. Stories mutate when they travel from group to group. Even two similar institutions like the two families can be the same and act completely different due to the other institutions the families involve themselves in. What we desire that isn't hardwired is taught to us socially, and when we care about people we tend to care about what they do too.

It's because we each decode information from a different perspective that two people can be in a situation with each other from different places and expect different outcomes. This is where new norms have to develop by creating a new story together about what we share and intend our outcomes to be. If the mutual story never happens we're both still telling different stories to ourselves about the desired outcomes. The only way a bond can happen between two people is if they both happen to care about enough of the same things to eventually care about each other. The only people who naturally love us are our parents. Everyone else who meets us in life won't care about us and only seek what we can do for their lives. In many cases people don't even do this on purpose. We like to tell ourselves lies in order to get something quickly from people most of the time that are only acquaintances or strangers and believe we're being good or even altruistic. When we do things that seem giving it's really to get something in return. The purpose of speech and action is to acquire potential desire. We only speak and act if we think we'll get something for doing so.

Since we like to lie to ourselves it's only through our experiences that we can learn what feels good and bad by doing the things that feel bad enough times that we have to stop lying to ourselves. An example is I care about you as my girlfriend. You tell me you care about me as only a friend. I then agree to be just friends and continue to hang around and shower you with phone calls and kind gestures. What I've done is lied to myself that I can be a friend, but the real reason I'm hanging around is to win you over. This gesture will in fact do the opposite in most cases, because the girl gets free attention at no expense and I get nothing, but they will lie to themselves too and never tell me to stop, because they like my attention even though they don't intend to date me. That's because I'm validating how wonderful they are and what will happen eventually is she will date someone else and all my work will be for nothing. This is an example of running into something that hurts and continuing it thinking it will turn out in my favor. All my friends could tell me that what I'm doing isn't going to work, but I continue telling myself the story I'm emotionally attached to. It's only till I act out this story enough times and hurt myself that I realize it doesn't work in my favor. That's because this person isn't my friend. They're an acquaintance who is doing what makes them feel good and I'm lying and telling myself that what I'm doing feels good too when it hurts, because I'm not getting the effect I want through speech and action. We can't speak sense into someone who is going through a problem, because it's only through their own action and speech they'll learn to change in time. Any advice they ask for is really to unload their problems and continue doing the thing that hurts. That's why we need to realize nobody really loves us in this world except our friends who have been around for the long haul.

If we can't change whom we care about we have to eliminate the person from our environment. When we care about things that aren't working in our favor we can continue to work on them till we get them right or quit and try something else. Through experience we learn what we are and aren't capable of. People on the other hand who haven't proven friendship by being around regularly for the long haul shouldn't be worked on. It's only by removing ourselves from their presence we can start working on things that feel good again and heal. Once somebody proves they aren't stable in our lives the way we'd like and they haven't reached the stage of true friend, they should automatically be discarded. The reason for this is because they won't change till they try the same thing on enough other people that they realize this thing never works in their favor. If they never learn it's not our problem anymore. If we hang around they'll continue to think we're the only people who have problems with the way they do things and they won't earn respect for us. At the same time we hurt ourselves in the process. If someone does something that hurts just leave whenever they appear, because they only intend to use you for what they want till you're dried out emotionally. It's not till several years pass we can try interacting with these people again, because our emotions have changed for new things that aren't them anymore.
Emotions are like billiard balls and if we throw an emotional billiard ball at someone and they don't react at all it's because they don't care about the thing we care about, so we're just throwing it at a brick wall in a sense and it bounces back at us. If we throw it and they react in a way we don't like, it's because they care about the thing we do but not the same way we do, and not really us or they'd react kindly. It's not till our emotions cause other's emotions to act in a way we approve of and they approve of that we both benefit and that's when we know it's safe to continue throwing these kind of billiard balls of emotion more often. When this happens long enough we develop the same morals and form friendships around them. When we both benefit we're stronger than all the people that never learned how to throw good emotions at anyone.