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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Insecurity in the world and self

All mental experiences come from prior physical experiences. All genetics are the passing on of physical experiences that people had before we existed. These give us the reactions we naturally intend to go toward and away from considering what feels good and bad physically or emotionally. Mental choices can't come from nothing and even mental ideas are physical reactions in the brain to external events. The historicity of self dictates that as emotional creatures we will act out things based on prior experiences that felt good or bad without even without knowing we're doing so in most cases. When one argues they have free will by choosing to raise their arm you'll find that the choice to do so wasn't really free, but a reaction to something in the external world. If we trace back the willing to raise the arm, we find the actions in the brain were inspired to react to something outside the body before choosing to move the body from the inside, which is also physical in the brain. That something prior to the choice to move the arm came from someone challenging the idea of the free will to do so, meaning someone in your external world challenged an idea that caused an emotional reaction in your brain and then your arm. The act can even be delayed such as being challenged by someone early in the day, then doing the action later to try and prove your free will to yourself is still a reaction what someone said outside of you earlier. The choice of the person challenging who is external to the person raising their arm came up with this challenge from something external to them, which was likely reading a book or someone challenging them in person, and you'll see this is actually physical external activities encouraging internal mental actions and reactions that we aren't even aware of due to causality of prior events. Where did the first challenge begin? Most likely it started in nature and the mutation of ideas by viewing it was eventually decoded as such an idea as free will, because we become conscious enough to view our reactions and consider them our own.


When we react to someone to try and prove what we think, it's because we care about what they think. We care about what people think because we have beliefs created from prior experiences with other people we care about plus care about ourselves, and do we choose who we care about or does it just happen through interactions? We don't choose who we care about, or the beliefs and ideas we care about, and this caring about people and ideas is what drives our wills to do things because we care what people think of certain actions we do tied to those things we aren't even conscious of most of the time. If someone chooses to put their hand on a hot stove and hold it there calling it free will because they're choosing more pain than pleasure, the real reason is because of external incentive and causality of the event. The person who put their hand on the stove either has a gun to their head, is offered money to do it, is given pride when dared by friends to be cool, or it can be as simple as they are emotionally tied to the belief of their free will to do so and by reacting to the challenge of the capability they can have pride in their belief, but this is still a reaction and not producing of a will from nothing. It's about caring what people think and we think, and since we don't choose who we care about or what ideas we care about we react to prove what we care about outside of free will. We don't choose what ideas we care about even though we think we do, because what we really do is say what we are good at is good and bad at is bad, and the people we care about are good so we care about the things they care about. So the "free choice" to burn one's self is really a reaction to others actions of challenging them to prove something and not a choice of free will.

Even our genes which are a series of emotional actions and reactions that seem to come from nothing came from a physical history of something acting in the world. A child acts as they do because their emotions naturally tell them to laugh or cry when certain things happen in their environment and their genes react. The only reason we don't act like children is because as the environments shaped us they taught us what behavior is acceptable and unacceptable. We're still as emotional as we always were; we just learned that expressing certain emotions, certain ways, in certain places, will bring more pleasure than pain in our environments. Why did the Christians let themselves be persecuted so long? It's because they believed there was a greater reward in heaven and they are emotionally tied to this idea and their friends who share it. If someone acted in a way that naturally felt bad to prove free will, once again I'd make the same argument, which is they are acting in a way that would be awkward to prove a point that was driven by external physical circumstances to gain more pride in something they care about than the pain of that particular action. They seem freely willing in their actions, but really did so as a reaction to the environment, because we really are emotional creatures seeking gratification and validation for the actions we make due to genes and due to physical reactions we learned from past experiences in our personal lives tied to beliefs, friends, and values.

This brings me to the insecurity of self and insecurity in the world. Although they are different concepts they are closely linked so when someone says they aren't an insecure person this is actually relative only to environment related to past similar or different environments (people, places, and things). It's the things and people we are most familiar with that we are most comfortable with and this is where we have the most security. Everyone is insecure insofar as they are in an unfamiliar task or interaction with a person they don't know well. Friends and family are people we're very familiar with, so we are the most secure with them. If we grow up in environments that had stable friends and family we're more likely to be naturally secure the more places we go for this reason, but that doesn't mean we can't have insecurity in the world, which does create insecurity of self. The first time we all went to school as kids we were very insecure because we were unfamiliar with the environment. As the year went on we became more secure with the environment realizing certain norms constantly take place in a particular manner and we make friends we become familiar with. The next year after a whole summer away from school we feel a little nervous again, and this pattern goes on all through life, but we get more and more secure with school in general because it became something we learned to always be somewhat familiar with. The insecurity of self can come about if we were always unpopular and picked in school, so no matter what school we go to for college we are always more shy and less talkative. This makes us more insecure in the world of school, but it doesn't mean we can't be more secure other places in life. The more environments we learn to be insecure in the more we have an insecurity of self over all. Since there will always be new environments we'll always be faced with the insecurity of self on some level. The same goes for people who have bad relationships over and over develop an idea of what a relationship should be like by claiming all things that made them insecure must be bad and all things that remain secure must be good unless a new person can prove old things wrong in our life, there by changing our interactions in the relationship as well and our belief of relationships.

Insecurity in the self exists on a spectrum due to relative insecurity in the world we found through prior experiences. If we always fell off a bike we'd never want to ride one again eventually. It's because we fall less than don't fall that we keep riding, and as long as the accumulation of good feelings override the bad ones we continue in a direction. What looks like free will then in a sense is more driven by utilitarian like ethics beneath the surface of subconscious action then by what we think is being freely willed. The past and the present dictate the future for us and the conscious mind is really just watching ourselves in action and not controlling the actions. Free will is the illusion of thinking we're causing an action, but the will is really due to prior physicality's we are most likely not aware of.

I'll express this further in some neuropsychology studies done by Patricia Churchland that show how ingrained our habits really are. Choices are made in the lateral intra-parietal cortex of the brain, which is influenced by the middle temporal area. It also gets information from sub-cortical structures that inform it of the goal. In a study where monkeys were asked to push a button showing the direction dots were moving on a screen, the action of pushing the button came seconds after the cells in this part of the brain started acting. The brain thinks before we are conscious of it, and the reason the monkey was willing to act is because if they answered correct they were given a food reward. Just by looking at a single cell it could be seen which decision the monkey had made before it even acted. LIP cells interpret the external environment and then react the way a statistician does by evaluating evidence and making a decision. This shows our rationality is based on probability and we make decision when we think we have enough evidence to act on something. Further evidence could possibly prove otherwise but the mind doesn't care to accumulate evidence on this level before acting. This is because our time in life is finite and we have limited time to fight or flight in our situations.

Brains are causal machines because neurons behave in causal manners where one neuron works on another and so on. A particular order of sequences must take place in order to exercise our wills. We consider, choose, intend, then act in order to will, but what makes us consider is caused by things around us based on what we know from prior interactions. The four things I listed before we will something are what we are conscious of, but that doesn't mean we're controlling them even if we feel we are. As Hume said we have beliefs, desires, reasons, and motives, and these all come from past experiences. We'd have to have such immense computational power to understand all probabilities that we can't possibly predict all out comes of the future so how can we will our life in specific directions? We can only base what we are familiar with to hope it sends us in a general direction. In another study people were given a clock to watch and push a button noting the time on the clock. Once again electrodes were placed on the scalp showing that people feel the urge to act in their mind quite some time prior to when they actually push the button. The point is that we already have different motor responses, skills, and habits, we developed prior. Part of the motor structure's job is to send signals to other structures that they are making a report of what is happening and we interpret that. There's a temporal contiguity between the cause in our minds and the actions we perform. It is unconscious elements that play a more powerful role in actions than anything conscious.

In another study by a psychologist in the Netherlands (I can't pronounce his name) he has number of cars that differ on four features in one experiment. The optimal car with the most features is pretty obvious. There's another experiment with cars that have twelve different features. These are two different experiments with two groups on each experiment. In the first experiment one group gets to look at the four aspects and consciously choose right away which car they want. The second group is distracted with a task for ten minutes before getting to choose. The first group does better. In the experiment with twelve features the same thing is done and oddly those who were distracted for ten minutes with a task picked the more optimal car than those who had time to consciously think about it. In other words we can make better decisions consciously when what we're focusing on is very simple, but we're more likely to act in our favor with the subconscious power when the variables and probabilities get to choose for us.

In another experiment Churchland shows the difference between intention and choice. What she does is give people a handful of pictures of children to choose from, takes the pictures, turns the pictures around in her own hand, and then gives them a different one than they chose. In 90% of cases people didn't notice the difference between what they chose and what they didn't. When asked why they chose the one they didn't they would tell a story about how this one is prettier and I like their hair and so on. They lied to themselves about what they didn't even choose. The only way we can possibly have a better future is to listen to each other in life because those minorities who see things slightly different may have insight into things most of us don't. Think of all the things we think we choose in life and then tell ourselves what actually happens is what we wanted compared to what we claimed to have wanted prior in the abstract. In another scenario people are given two jams to try in a supermarket with two very different flavors as well as with teas and the outcome is very similar to the pictures where people are told they liked a different one than they chose and they make up why they chose it and like it more. We seem to function better when we don't think about what we are going into very hard than when we over think.

In another experiment we are shown how the unconscious will can be primed. People were given words they had to unscramble and make into sentences. One group has words like social, connect, and relationship to give them a mindset of a talker and listener. Another group is given words like compete, do your best, and someone for achievement and success. After this they give each group another unrelated job to work on a puzzle with someone. Those who had words to be more social and listening were more likely to be the confederate and take orders as well as be dumber and make mistakes, where as the second group wanted to take control of the process. When people say words don't hurt me they're lying. Another thing is when the non achievers were asked to quit the puzzle they didn't want to and would say wait I can do this. Those who were primed to be successful quit easily. People can be primed for power too if they are put in the professors chair versus a guest chair. People who were found to be more communally oriented and put in the chair really wanted to help people while taking responsibility for the situation. People found to be in it for themselves oriented or exchange oriented and were put in the professors chair had a more self oriented way of giving out tasks to benefit themselves and blaming others when things went bad.

In another experiment two pictures were shown to two different sets of people. One was of a library and one was of a railroad. Each person was told to examine closely and give opinions on what they thought about the architecture and design because they were going to go to these places to work on them. Afterward they are given a completely unrelated list of words to read and the people who were told they were going to the library would whisper them and those going to the railroad would yell them. If they were never told they would visit these places it didn't affect how they read the words afterward.

When giving people achievement words versus neutral words in another unscramble into sentences task, they were also given another task after this. Those who are taught to be aggressive and compete without knowing it and were given tough tasks after tended to fail and get very angry or miserable. The neutral people were given tough tasks and didn't care if they failed much. After this even a confederate was told to walk down the hall toward them as they left the test like they were going to collide with them. Those who were taught to be competitive would walk right at the confederate and dodge at the last minute. Those who had neutral words walked out of the way past the person moving aside early on. People who are taught to be aggressive tend to have worse moods and are less happy than those who aren't. Even Aristotle talks about developing appropriate habits from the time people are young for the right rewards if we are to live well. People with long experience and discipline in certain environments and actions will be the most secure and perform the best.

Since we are creatures of desire and only speak and act to get things, we won't be happy till we're in the right environments that give us the things to desire that will make us the happiest long term and we can have. We can't stop caring about people and ideas, so we don't freely will where we choose to act. When a friend gets hurt by someone and they ask us for advice, we'll find that in most cases people don't listen to us if they love someone more than the advice we give, and so people will act on what they want even if everyone around them claims it won't work to their advantage. The only way people seem to learn is by running into a brick wall enough times that they realize it hurts more than it brings good things before they change actions. We can prime people before they walk into situations so they may act a little different but it seems we only get more secure and knowledgeable with our own experiences. You can't speak sense into someone about something they love or care about and it's only through their own pain in pursuing it they may eventually change from learning that.

This is why we should prime people to stop putting their fingers in the dyke of a person who is a part of their life when that person starts leaking. People who leak on us are going to keep leaking till they have enough other experiences away from us that make them realize we were a good thing being taken advantage of in their lives. When we hang around and try to fix things with someone that keeps making our lives painful or try to find solutions in the area that can't be fixed anyway, such as a person breaks our heart and we start thinking of how to fix them, replace them, or date different; what we're doing is putting our finger in the same dyke. The person will respect us less for hanging around and trying to fix them and our situation with them when they were broken before us and then blame us instead for their brokenness. Trying to figure out how to approach dating different or replacing people is still worrying about that part of your life that isn't changing at this point. It will hurt regardless but it's wiser to move to an area of town where the dykes are good and the resources we have there are stable and can be built on till the pain in the old part of town has a few years to pass. By this time things will have changed in our lives or the place we came from enough for us to visit that place, and possibly start a new friendship where it used to be part of our problems.

The purpose of speech.

The primary purpose of action and speech is to create self-definition. The secondary purpose is validation, security, and to prove our existence to ourselves. It’s not so much if we exist as much as why we exist and in what manner we should, as well as the relation of our existence to that of other people and things around us. Speech helps define where we think we should belong and what we should do while we’re here. Nothing defines us more from other people than the fact we can act and speak differently than they do. Although within a group the actions and speech are very similar we have a slight marginality between overlap of our own uniqueness. Unlike the objects we create with our hands, action and speech come directly from us, while those things we make to represent ourselves are more similar to photocopies of our actions and speech. Someone may claim they are not insecure and don’t seek validation through their actions and speech, but I’ll make the claim that security and stability are constantly in a state of diminishing similar to the way our bodies are in a constant state of decay by a certain peak, and just as we would eat well and exercise to slow this process and maintain what we have, we also seek to constantly reassert our validation and security through action and speech. If we were forever secured and felt our existence was valid we’d never have to speak or act again. Some may argue that they don’t speak and act to get validation or security, but choose to do it because they like to and it’s fun. These to me are byproducts of the real reason that we are genetically inclined to choose action and speech for the purpose I claim they exist.

The reason we speak is to generate a physical reaction. Since life comes down to physics for me in many ways I’ll say the pressures in our external environment create pressures on our internal environment causing us to say things we think will be interactive with that environment. When we speak it’s either to hear someone speak back or to cause their bodies to move. Both of these are physical in a sense because their organs have to move to create a sound in order to react to the sound we make. We wouldn’t speak if we didn’t want a reaction, and a reaction validates that what we said was important enough to react to and there would be no reaction. If we were to continually yell at someone without them responding in some way we would become upset, because we are speaking so they do something for us to make our existence feel valid and give it purpose. If people react to what we say then it means we must matter and people who ignore us should probably be talked to less or perhaps not at all if they never respond. People can drive themselves crazy to get a response from someone who doesn’t care about them enough to respond, so this action isn’t hitting something emotionally in others that gives us a reaction we’d like on the frequency we’d like.

People who aren’t our friends may very well plays games with us and not realize it, because they may only speak to us when they want a reaction and we always give it to them, but when we want it they may not always respond as much as we’d like. It’s those who want the least in an interaction that have the most power over a situation when it comes to speech, because they always get as much as they want when they want it from someone who cares enough to give it, but the other can’t ever get enough of their own desire in the process. It’s not till we realize we’re being used more than we’d like to use that we can stop acting and speaking more than is being responded to. When two people want to use each other at the level water meets on a regular basis we call it friendship or love. People might be more likely to respond to anger when kindness doesn’t work, but love and hate are just two different versions of the same thing, which is caring and if we get apathy we should give nothing, but if we get hate back for our hate we aren’t really getting something good anyway, so this doesn’t allow us to be validated in a positive way.

The difference between friendship and strangers is when we speak to friends it’s to maintain the secure, stable, environment we already have in their presence by building on what has already existed prior. This is the positive validation that keeps us knowing we exist in a way that feels good and matters as well as confirms our beliefs about existence. These are the people we relate our experiences to and come to conclusions with about what things we can agree are reality and what things aren’t, as well as what things are right and wrong about reality that we need to change or avoid if wrong, and continue to act upon if right so we can maintain our secure and stable lives to the best of our knowledge. When we speak to strangers in a manner that isn’t business it’s to seek another kind of validation and security. We already know the bureaucracy of most business we deal with like giving money to a cashier so these are limited in emotion. It’s those we seek in leisure speech that we’re testing how much we matter by getting emotional reactions seeking care about us for speaking. Since these people aren’t our friends we’re testing the claims about reality we’ve already come to with our friends to either get them confirmed or rejected by strangers. If they are confirmed then we can maintain them easier the more people agree. The things that get rejected will either strengthen our belief in them if we can argue them well, or cause us to believe otherwise if we’re defeated in speech or action. We will always be more likely to believe our friends over strangers on matters pertaining to reality, existence, and validation, which is why we keep them close to maintain a stable and secure environment we can exist in together.

When we talk to strangers somewhere like a party it’s to see if they have the potential to care about us and what we think matters in existence too. If they don’t care about us at all they won’t react. If they don’t care about us but care enough to disagree with what we’re saying they’ll follow through with conversation, because it must be about something they feel should be defended in speech concerning claims to reality. They care about the topic emotionally. The reason we speak to strangers is to test if we or what we think matters enough to validate us personally or what we believe in, which is closely tied to our existence, because these things are motives we live by each day. The truth is we’re all insecure when it comes to people we don’t know well and choose to talk to because we potentially hope to matter enough to be talked back to in a positive manner like our friends do for us. When we talk about matters pertaining to things that involve the actions of people versus other people in lifestyle we’re most likely setting ourselves up for debate, but if we talk about things that aren’t people it’s easier to find agreement about reality and this is small talk people test the waters with before important topics might come up. Small talk can be questions about what an individual does each day with the objects around them and there may be deeper inquiry into the functions of those objects. A lot of times we start conversations with strangers by pointing out obvious objects in the environment at the time or a task we’re both involved in. When we eventually get into deeper topics and if we can find comfort about enough of them on a continuing basis we eventually call these people friends also.

The difference between a friend and an acquaintance is that a friend exists fairly regular in our lives and interactions with acquaintances are random, and sometimes friends can becomes acquaintances and acquaintances eventually might be friends. The difference between and acquaintance and stranger are we already know it’s comfortable to talk to an acquaintance in random encounters. The reason an acquaintance doesn’t become a friend is because they have limited agreements with us on what matters in reality to where we may only interact at the few places we share those rare things in common like a party. That means our actual friends are very limited in life to a small group of people. We should be as close to these people as possible. They make us the most secure and stable because speech and action are so reciprocal we don’t even think about the reactions we’ll get anymore. As for all other people we live in a world of insecurity that we have to validate our beliefs of reality and existence against compared to the group we already identify our views with. Where there isn’t fear in speech with strangers there is aggression.

Speech as some claim isn’t a market system where we measure how much speech gets how much reaction, and those who do don’t find themselves very happy. The way a person gets good at running isn’t by riding a bike, skating, and lifting weights, but simply to run. To become better at speech in ways that feel like they’re getting the reactions we’d like isn’t to measure them against the people in our lives to our own, but to do it when it feels right. If it feels wrong we should just stop speaking in places that don’t give us the validation we’d like, because eventually we’ll start feeling like we don’t matter, and if we really want to feel insignificant in the universe we can just look at the stars each night and realize our insignificance instead of testing our hearts against those who won’t give us the time of day as we’d like. Speech and action are not measurements the way a product is on the market. We can measure ipod A against ipod B, because ipod’s don’t have feelings and we can only project our own into them insofar as what we can get out of them. We aren’t supposed to rationalize the subjective value of our interactions with people against other people like an ipod, because projecting emotions into people is done to be reciprocal, and the value of speech with one person next to another isn’t something we can measure the same as an object and its output. When people tell us we could do better we don’t just drop one person and pick up another like an ipod. What some see as discontent in our interactions could very well be highly content to us when it comes to the quality of people in our lives. Speech and action are not a market system to measure our security under. Our friends should be the center of the universe and the world should be measured only against the group idea value in life and existence.