homoeoteleutonadmin – Page 8

Reflections on Aphorisms #76

I’ve decided to spend some time going over François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (Project Gutenberg link). I’m not going to necessarily do them exclusively for a while, but I’m going to pick through the ones that interest me and give them my treatment.

My dream life has become more vivid of late. I always view that as a mixed bag. I’m a fan of the Jungian theory that many dreams are messages from the unconscious mind, and they’re not always a sign that things are going well. On the other hand, I enjoy having dreams and they haven’t seemed particularly malign, so I’m hoping they hold some hidden potential for me.

Aphorism #114

We have all sufficient strength to support the misfortunes of others. (Maxim 19)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

I like to rant a lot about vices and the limits of humanity, but today I want to take a more positive approach and talk about what we’re good for.

I generally believe that people have a self-deceptive view of themselves that glosses over failings and projects them on others (or elements within the self which are innocent of vice), and that tends to make for a depressing subject matter. I swear I’m more upbeat in person.

But one of the things about this failure to perceive the self is that it also means that our virtues go unnoticed.

One of the things that people don’t realize is that they have power that enables them to be good.

I see a lot of people who fall into nihilistic and bitter philosophies. They oppose things for the sake of opposing them, falling into an Adversary archetype (which is something that merits discussion at a later date).

These people often have an under-developed sense of their own potential and their own virtues. It’s worth noting that it is possible for a person to lack virtue, even as the potential for virtue is ubiquitous.

One of the things that I feel people have a duty to do is to help others. I don’t mean this in the sense of an obligation, though people who don’t do it definitely place themselves in peril for doing so, but rather a sort of Way. To help others is to fulfill part of our larger purpose for being. You don’t have to, but if you don’t you’re playing with fire.

And the reason for that is that you’re not using your strength.

Jordan Peterson talks a lot about this, so I owe him credit for some of the foundation of this idea, but I think that there’s another thought that I don’t believe he’s developed strictly in this context.

As humans, we’re both independent and interconnected in ways that are impossibly complex. There’s a collective unconscious, which is both a product of long-term biological and social developments and a reflection of the zeitgeist.

When we help others, we’re reacting to that unconscious. We’re connecting to the being–psychologically understood–of humanity at large. It’s a way to shape our minds, to bring us closer in union. Of course, there is always some danger in this. Drowning people are dangerous, and you can expose yourself to things that you don’t want to expose yourself to. You really have to be strong to help others. If you’re weak, you will join them in suffering, but do nothing to ameliorate their condition.

The great news is that we have that strength within us, which is what Rochefoucauld is identifying here.

Resolution

Bolster my strengths.

Never assume that I can’t help.

Remember that others make me, and I can impact others.

Reflections on Aphorisms #75

Another day, another thought. I’m really kind of tired and worn out after so much crunch. Even though I haven’t really been getting more done than usual, I’ve been forcing myself to focus on single projects, which tends to exhaust me more than spreading my efforts out.

I’m also just generally forcing myself to work a little further ahead, at the cost of putting off some of the stuff that I’d normally be publishing now so that I can get it out on a more regular schedule going forward.

Aphorism 113

The man who lives free from folly is not so wise as he thinks.
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

One of the things that I find interesting about folly is that the people who obsess over being fooled are often the ones who wind up falling for things that a more rational observer would not put any credit in.

There’s a storytelling trope, going back to Aesop’s writings about the Fox who wants to think of himself as more clever than he is, that the person who values his own self-enlightenment usually closes the pathways to true enlightenment.

It’s worth noting that in the Biblical story of Solomon, Solomon values wisdom, but he seeks it outside himself, requesting it from God.

A lot of the time people want to live their lives in such a way that they try to make sense of everything in the context of the rules they create.

I think we see some of this in secular philosophies, both the modern and especially the postmodern (despite its insistence to the contrary) where there’s a desire to put the universe in a rational box. The problem is that while there may be nothing wrong with the desire to do this, it can become a force that corrupts what capabilities we have to judge.

When we try to live without folly, we really deny ourselves anything which we judge to be without value or meaning. We are poor judges of this. There is a value to almost everything, and the question is whether it holds value to us at a given moment or not.

I think of music as one of these “grand follies”, though Chesterton identifies quite a few in the course of his work (like a good cigar or glass of wine, neither of which would fit my preferences) that are a little more nuanced than my own preferences.

Of course, music in many ways has meaning as a reflection of the pattern of the universe and a form of communication, but let’s put that aside for a minute.

Looking at music strictly as an aesthetic phenomena, it has two roles: beauty and manipulation.

The beauty is “folly” by many definitions. This is the sort of thing people deny themselves, deriding it as pleasant but not worth time.

Of course, music also allows us to manipulate our perception, because our brains respond to it. If I want to get stuff done, I put on loud, fast music that pumps me up. If I’m in a melancholy or contemplative mode, I’ll listen to something like what I’m currently listening to (currently a piece off of a modern TV soundtrack, but I’ll use classical music just as readily).

I love this song. Lost and Milowda from the same album are great too.

However, the effects of something like this quickly fade. Barring a handful of classics, acclimation tends to quickly erase any connotation that a song may have.

So we’re left with just the pleasant feelings that we get from the music.

This is the sort of “folly” that people deny themselves thinking that they would have to sacrifice something valuable to appreciate.

I’m no hedonist by any means, but I also think that there’s an importance to sitting back and celebrating what is good in the universe; there’s not all that much of it, and we should devote ourselves to making as much as possible.

When we let our neuroses get the better of us, we don’t do that.

When I was a child I never wanted to leave the house to go anywhere. I wasn’t agoraphobic or anything like that, I just wouldn’t go out. The pleasures I could get around the house and my comfort in familiar environments outweighed my willingness to explore and experience new avenues.

Those who resist “folly” without evaluating it often wind up living like I did as a kid. They deny any untested experience based on the limits of what they are capable of conceiving. This causes them to miss out on many things.

Resolution

Don’t assume the hostility of the unknown.

Except in matters of vice, step beyond boundaries.

Abandon pride.

Reflections on Aphorisms #74

It’s been a long, but triumphant day.

I finally finished one of the big projects I was working on, and now I feel that things are returning to an equilibrium of sorts.

From here the only way to go is up. Of course, that could be because I’ve cast myself so far into the unknown that I am in such a state of risk that the fruition of that risk would represent a solidification, rather than a degradation, of my condition.

Or, in simple language: I’m betting big, and I’m betting on myself.

Aphorism 112

The tyrant and the mob, the grandfather and the grandchild, are natural allies.
Schopenhauer

Interpretation

I’m not terribly familiar with Schopenhauer. I know that Jung references him quite a bit in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which I wrote a review of (which can be found here) but if I ever read any of his work it would have been a small excerpt at most.

This sounds very much like a 20th century sentiment, though it’s worth noting that Schopenhauer spoke before our experiences with totalitarianism in the 20th century. Of course, his period in Europe was marked with a certain amount of turmoil (as any period in Europe tends to be), so it’s worth noting that he’s not necessarily talking about totalitarianism as we see it.

One of the things that I find interesting is the concept of a mob, precisely because I am so mild-mannered.

The idea of losing myself in a group psychological phenomena is terrifying to me. Of course, I do organized religion, and I count my experiences in worship with a Charismatic denomination among my fondest religious experiences (though I split with them on dogmatic lines; my sect doesn’t do the speaking in tongues thing prominently), which is a group phenomena at its strongest.

Nietzsche has a saying about fighting monsters and the tragic tendency that people have to turn into whatever they struggle against. It’s not necessarily an in-kind thing, but it’s interesting.

One of the most important and least discussed events in history is probably the French Revolution (in case people lose track, I’m referring to the one that happened directly after the American Revolution).

There was a major difference between the French Revolution and the American one (though, sadly for us Americans, the difference was not as pronounced), and it was that the French Revolution was more heavily emotional for the French. Where the Americans channeled their distrust toward a foreign power–this is a gross simplification, but works in the sense that they were a colony and not mainland Britain–the French had turned it inward.

There was a great outcry against injustice, and a lot of it was well-earned by a tyrant.

But the mob only succeeded in creating a succession of worse tyrants. They destroyed the laws of a corrupt system, and replaced them with chaos.

Just because the mob may reject a tyrant does not mean that they will not assign one from their ranks once they have their thirst for blood quenched, or even while the lust for destruction still rages in their veins.

I think that some of this has to do with how the mob works. We weaken ourselves to emotion, creating a vulnerability that we exploit to bring us beyond our daily patterns and lives. It breaks us free of our traditions and our heuristics.

The problem is that those things are responsible for civilization and a good part of what people refer to when they use the word “humane” about behavior.

We’re less moral than we appreciate. A lot of our “good” behavior comes from not having contemplated evil, from being afraid of it. People claim virtues where they have weaknesses keeping them from freedom, rather than an objective triumph over evil.

Both the tyrant and the mob break free of these things. Both have a capacity for destruction limited only by the words and sacrifices of honest people.

Resolution

Be willing to sacrifice for the future.

Fortify virtue.

Honesty is worth all price.

Reflections on Aphorisms #73

As I write more, I find myself finally starting to develop some more of the differences in form and tone that I’ve been going for. This doesn’t apply as much to this writing; these aphorism reflections are well within my comfort zone by this point, but I’m definitely making more progress on my own development as a writer.

It’s not as fruitful as I’d hoped, since I’m actually down a little on word count, but I think I’m getting ready to write better as well as more.

Aphorism 111

History is the science of what never happens twice.
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry

Interpretation

What astounds me is that the universe is constantly in states it has never been in before. This level of distinction can apply all the way down to the most minuscule of things. By the time my finger depresses the key to type a letter I am no longer the person I was, or at least not in the same state as I was, when the impulse to press the key was formed in my brain.

I attribute this understanding of the universe with a lot of who I am as a person. I don’t like arbitrary distinctions. I don’t think they’re as useful as people think, though I do believe they’re part of the way our minds work.

As a result, I fight constantly against what I consider the default state of being.

I also believe that it is in this, as much as anything else, that I may be accused of hypocrisy. Admittedly, I tend to draw these distinctions in unreal things, rather than reality: storytelling, game design, and the like, not real things.

But at the same time I have an appreciation of the fact that even my understanding of something as ubiquitous as the human mind is drawn from, essentially, drawing mountains upon mountains of arbitrary distinctions.

I think what Valéry is getting at here is that the world never unfolds the same way twice. Despite what people think, we’re not deterministic creatures, and there’s no universal arc of history, as comforting as it might be to think that we’re at an advanced climax of our kind.

A lot of what we think we know is precisely that: what we think we know.

I think of an example from education: modes of learning. It was a great theory that asked whether people learned better when given the method of learning that they preferred best.

The answer is: kinda.

On one hand, people were more likely to engage in learning activities that matched their preferences, but on the other these highly designed and cultivated activities proved little better than the ones that did not rely on different learning methods.

If something is taught best with the written word, a diagram doesn’t necessarily do it better. Combining multiple means does have an advantage, but only when the information is complicated.

However, if I were to try and present a novel using photographs of key scenes, the result would be that students would learn relatively little from the photographs. They may help foster visualization, but the actual exercise of them observing images only works if the purpose I am after links to those images.

I often taught a novel called Inside Out and Back Again, which recounts a Vietnamese refugee’s experiences fleeing her homeland in a fictional framework.

One of the things that I did before teaching it was to give a gallery of images that depicted a variety of important scenes in the Vietnam War.

The reason for this is that it gave the students a chance to engage with the part of the world that they were going to see, and stressed for them what it was like to wait in line for a ride out of Saigon while hundreds of people were being turned away ahead of you.

However, once we got into the novel it would never have occurred to me to show images of the scenes that were depicted, because it’s made up of poems with visuals. Unless students don’t know something important (like what a papaya is) to help them visualize the scenes, I’d actually be detracting from my learning goals by showing them depictions.

Not all information is created equal.

And in our lives we encounter information that is unique to us. How we hear it, how we see it, how it is passed on to us, our mood and condition when we hear it, and our immediate situation will all vary when we encounter any situation in our life that is worth noticing.

We will never repeat history.

That we look for trends in it is worthwhile, but only in the sense that it lets us understand the greater human condition, the ties that bind us together. We can search for something like Jung’s collective unconscious, but it will never deliver to us a rule that lets us predict the future.

We’re simply very good at deceiving ourselves.

Resolution

Don’t assume knowing the past means knowing the future.

Don’t teach calculus with a philosophical treatise.

Accept that every situation is unique, every response needs to be considered carefully.

Reflections on Aphorisms #72

Short reflection today because I’ve been bad about getting started in a timely fashion. Fortunately some of my bigger time crunches are getting done soon, so it shouldn’t be an issue for much longer.

Aphorism 110

Reason is God’s gift; but so are the passions: reason is as guilty as passion.
John Henry Newman

Interpretation

One of the things that I think people overlook about reason is the fact that it’s a neurochemical process.

Now, that’s not to say that I don’t believe that there’s more to the brain than just chemistry; I’m a religious man, and that means that I have some belief in our humanity stretching deeper than we can know.

However, I’m also not ignorant of science, and I know that a lot of how our brain works is basically electricity and chemicals.

A lot of what we consider to be really important to us is nothing more than a function that’s going on. Our emotions, for instance, seem highly driven by our brain chemistry. Consciousness is a little more complicated, which is part of the reason we don’t understand it very much.

Even so, we’d be foolish to assume that our own biological limitations are not in play with every act of reason.

One of the things that I am kind of fixated on is the idea that we’re heuristic beings. We work based off of slapdash jury-rigging, cognitively speaking, and we don’t have a whole lot of self-awareness for what’s carefully considered and what is a hack to get through the day alive.

Like, think of phobias. If you can’t do certain things, you’re at a distinct disadvantage, but it’s also really useful for your brain to just out-and-out say “I’m not a fan of dark places” when you’re thinking about going into a dark place, because you don’t know what danger’s there.

Reason may exist on a level above the heuristic, but it’s still drawn from it. Deliberately thinking about things can let us achieve a new perspective, but it’s the same pair of eyes feeding those observations as feed our intuition.

The other day I shared a diagram in which I pointed out that there’s basically three fundamental parts to the universe as it pertains to us : the predictable future, the expected unknown, and the entirely unknown.

The predictable future is what our heuristics and reason try to grasp, and reason goes a step further into the expected unknown.

The problem with reason is that it can only turn unknown to expected unknown, rather than unknown into predictable future.

Never forget that our limitations are a lot more than they look. We’re basically miracle boxes, but even then we’re squishy ones with not a whole lot of stored information.

Resolution

Don’t forget to evaluate my assumptions.

The unknown remains the unknown, even if you think you’ve figured it out. Don’t assume there’s a fundamental difference between its two states.

Go fast when the heuristics are good.

Reflections on Aphorisms #71

Aphorism 109

In the city, time becomes visible.
Lewis Mumford

Interpretation

I finished a Great Courses audio-book on the history of common people today, so this aphorism seems particularly applicable to me.

One of the things about people is that we alter the entropy around us. We might temporarily stall it, intentionally hasten it, or even just modulate it, but the effect becomes stronger as we come together.

In a rural village for most of the history of humanity, life remained the same for decades or centuries at a time. People came and went, as did their structures, but the actual lifestyle stayed the same, even as regimes and beliefs changed.

I don’t think the same is true today to the same extent, but mostly because our standards of what constitutes a small settlement have changed. I think of the small town where I would visit my grandmother as a child.

Barring a visitor center, I don’t think that there has been any significant construction since the last time I visited, which was before I was an adult.

There’s no need for it. The population is small, and while the individuals and businesses may change over time the actual buildings themselves do not. The library where I spent so much of my youth remains in the same state it was when I left it last, the grocery store down the street and the hotel across town are still where they were, and will likely be there for the next decade. There’s no stimulus to change the substance of the town.

Admittedly, there were stimuli that could change the environment, but in these cases they were often not human in origin: fires, earthquakes, famines, and the like that displaced people may have changed the landscape, but people would either settle back into the same lifestyle elsewhere or move to a city.

Only where people concentrated did one see a vast amount of differences over time. Cities have a lot of people, and they concentrate resources. Building, especially the luxury of deconstruction and reconstruction, becomes a pastime and then a necessity.

Each person contributes more to the change until the chaos–or conversion of chaos into order–reaches a critical point and things are put into motion.

And just because this works on a macro-scale doesn’t mean it’s absent in smaller examples of life.

Think about how much of your time you spend actually working toward something valuable. If you represented it as a percentage, is it in the double digits? I know that for much of my life mine has been low–perhaps even as low as the single digits during my youth and college years–though it’s gone up quite a bit in my more recent years (teaching has a way of converting your free time into time spent laboring toward a goal, though not always in a way that feels productive).

As you bring that number up, you’ll find it having an increasingly great impact. I read or listen to audio-books for possibly as much as 20% of my waking hours each day. I have learned more this year than I have in my last two years combined, and not for lack of trying.

So push yourself. Do everything you can. Don’t forget to live a little (100% productivity is a great path to burnout), but if something you do has no meaning figure out a way to eradicate it and replace it with something that does.

Resolution

Stop doing worthless things.

Remember that change increases exponentially, not linearly.

Sleep, eat, drink. Then wake up and accomplish something.

Review: Of Dice and Men

I recently read David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men (Amazon affiliate link), a book that provides an overview of what roleplaying games are and how they came to be.

I’m a game designer myself, so I’m fairly familiar with the industry. However, Ewalt’s work is intended for anyone; a novice or outsider can benefit just as much as an old-school gamer.

This can be credited to his journalistic work, actually going on the ground and talking to people who were intimately involved with the advent of Dungeons and Dragons.

And the book predominantly focuses on D&D. There’s a few reasons for that; not the least of which being that D&D is the largest game and that the events surrounding it tend to have to been played out over and over again within the industry. Ewalt’s own gaming hobby extends beyond D&D, though most of the examples of gaming are given from the context of D&D’s “3.5” edition.

With that said, it’s worth pointing out that in a 250 page book, more mention could be made of alternative games. Ewalt has a connection to D&D that runs deep, both in terms of the game itself and the interviewees throughout the book, but he misses a lot of potential by not looking outside the box. While he is able to draw a few connections that would be difficult to draw from scattered details and show a side of the industry that you don’t always get to see from the outside by getting an inside look at how the sausage is made, so many of the events are part of “nerd canon” as it were that there’s a little bit of overlap.

And it’s worth noting that Ewalt’s story is deeply personal. If you have no experience with D&D at all, this serves an illustrative purpose. I can appreciate it as a journalistic device as well, since it’s giving an insight to how the game is actually played.

These interludes are not poorly written, though I wouldn’t describe it as being made up of grand narratives. They’re evidentiary, not epic, and somewhat romanticized and streamlined (at least compared my own experiences).

I personally enjoyed the book quite a bit. It covers a variety of angles: personal interest, living history, explanation of a phenomena, and so forth. However, the one place where I will give it a bit of grief is this: Of Dice and Men really wants to be incredibly dramatic, and there are places where it is willing to sacrifice to do so.

Let me give an example. There’s a section where Of Dice and Men covers the whole history of gaming, but goes through it in maybe twenty or thirty pages. It also spends thirty pages on wargaming, which directly preceded D&D (Gary Gygax was primarily involved with wargaming when D&D became the new hot thing, as was Dave Arneson). The legal woes of TSR practically get a chapter unto themselves (which is not necessarily bad), while the decade and a half following them gets largely blipped over until we come to D&D Next.

Admittedly, this is the time which would be familiar to most gamers at the time of publication, but at the same time it feels like it’s a bit of a jarring transition. When you’ve already got 250 pages, what are another 50? Some incredibly influential games, like White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade get hardly any mention, and despite the in-depth history of TSR almost none of their other games get any serious coverage.

I don’t think that this is accidental, but I do think that if Ewalt had wanted to cover the full phenomena of roleplaying games as a culture he could have included some of the more notable alternatives, both because they’ve had a huge influence and because they serve as a potential gateway to people who don’t have an interest in the swords-and-sorcery setting that D&D is most known for. Likewise, the main discussion of D&D’s many settings is limited to Greyhawk and Blackmoor, both of which are noteworthy and meaningful, but the transition to different settings marks noteworthy philosophical shifts.

Do I recommend this book? Yes, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It has a lot of good ideas for people who want to get into gaming, and it has stuff that even an old hand like myself can get into and learn from. However, it doesn’t quite achieve what I think it set out to achieve. If you rely on it for all your knowledge you’ll be left with gaps. This is true of almost any book, but Of Dice and Men comes so close to greatness that it legitimately hurts when it only nears its potential.

Reflections on Aphorisms #70

I had a productive day, but kind of lost track near the end so we’re in another situation where we’ll have just one aphorism tonight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about speech and freedom. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I don’t like to say what I really think because I don’t want people to respond in a negative way.

It’s not that I’m particularly controversial. I’m fairly moderate in almost every way, and those few ways in which I am not are all derived from moral foundations.

Still, we live in scary times. There’s something that Jordan Peterson once said about the matter of freedom of speech: “It is not safe to speak, and it never will be. But the thing you’ve gotta keep in mind is that it’s even less safe not to speak. It’s a balance of risks: do you want to pay the price for being who you are and stating your mode of being in the world, or do you want to pay the price for being a bloody serf, and one that’s enslaved him-or-herself?”

I like to think that these explorations of aphorisms are my attempt to say what I think without stepping on toes, but even then I sometimes worry that I’m setting myself up for trouble down the road.

Aphorism 108

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
John Morley

Interpretation

One of the things that I find interesting about the modern day is that speech has become something that is a measure of who we are.

We revere speech when it’s done in the ways we approve of.

When people say things we don’t like, they’re apostates.

It’s one of the few bipartisan issues, and the great thing is that there are always people who say things for which they should be condemned, which muddies the water quite handily.

The problem is that we wear our alliances on our sleeves and they have increasingly become our identity.

Of course, this isn’t to say that similar situations have never happened in history, though I shudder to recall some of the other instances (what comes to mind first in my knowledge of history is the late 1850’s in the US, which is not a good place to be drawing comparisons to), but I think that we’re in a very different place for a simple reason.

We’ve lost our foundations, so the superficial displays are all we’ve got.

One of the things that I think is leading people toward destruction and perdition is losing the ability to talk normally and freely.

I read a lot. That’s not a boast, it’s just a statement. I started this year with a goal of reading a book a week, and I’m running closer to two. I’m keeping my readings eclectic as much as possible to avoid getting into a rut.

One of the fields that I’ve spent a lot of time on is psychoanalysis.

I’m something of a devotee of Jung and the field of depth psychology, though I generally disagree with Jung on many of his final conclusions I think that he’s correct 90% of the time.

One of the things that we see in psychology is that you wind up with complexes that are a result of certain situations and phenomena within the psyche.

I think that a lot of our ills in our society are coming from this desire to eradicate evil not only in ourselves but also in others (in fact, it seems predominantly directed toward others and sometimes ignores the self).

It’s a flawed goal. The methods needed will themselves corrupt us, and that’s if we are correct in our assumptions. Our aim tends to be pretty bad.

What we wind up with are two complexes.

The first is projection of guilt. People who demand moral perfection in themselves but don’t reach their goals will often begin to see their flaws in other people. When one remains unaware of their tendency to do this, it becomes destructive.

The remedy to this is fairly simple. You need to learn to let go of other people.

I had to work out of this complex myself, and I think I often still see it function in my mind. I blame a genetic propensity, or maybe familial acculturation, because I see it a lot in my family (or, if you want to get spiritual, you could say it’s generational sin).

The things that helped me get over this were three-fold:

I realized I was pretty awful, objectively speaking. I’ve gotten better, but I’m still not what I’d consider good. I use the term “good” in a moral sense only on choice occasions, so I’ll extend this to say that I’m somewhere between mediocre and slightly-better-than-mediocre, depending on the day.
I realized that everyone has their own agency and responsibility, and if I turned my attention to others I’d never fix myself, and I definitely needed fixing first. There’s a biblical injunction about “looking first to the log in your own eye” before you help your neighbor with simple problems and judge them. As a judgmental personality type (to such a degree that personality types exist, which is a complex matter), I definitely needed to awaken to this.
I realized that anything I did to condemn other people only hurt them. The result: Forgive everything, forget what one can safely forget. I don’t have control over other people, and odds are they don’t really have control over themselves, because I don’t always have control over myself (through my own moral weakness). I let go.

The other complex that forms from a society that creates an untouchable class is that of the exile-in-society.

These are the people who become dangerous and bitter. They gravitate toward nihilism and destruction because there is no other path left.

And why should they have another path? They have given us our best, and we rejected it out of hand.

Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t reject things. Rejection is the best method that society has to direct people, since it’s less coercive than the alternatives.

But the problem is that we reject people, rather than their actions or ideas.

We silence them without converting them, and do so at our peril.

Resolution

Don’t silence those I don’t like.

Remember that judgement needs to come from the right spirit.

Put the cure before the anodyne.

Reflections on Aphorisms #69

Short Sunday post, as is customary. I spent some time going through my book of aphorisms before I settled on an option, since I was looking for something that particularly piqued my interest.

In this case, it has to do with the great struggle between action and inaction, something which I find myself intimately acquainted with.

Aphorism 107

He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.
Halifax

Interpretation

I have within myself a destructive urge for perfection. It’s the sort of thing that has rarely done me much good, because I hold myself to impossible standards.

I think I have always had a particular aversion to chance. I remember being inflexible as a child, having a really hard time when things went against what I was planned.

Once, there was another kid named Kyle who joined my class at Sunday School. I don’t remember how old I was–perhaps three or four, maybe five–but the people running the class seemed to think that I should write my last name on my cubby name-tag to indicate who I was.

I was a very literate youth, for all my faults. My problem was never whether or not I could read or write (though my handwriting has always left something to be desired), but always whether or not I learned anything when I did. I’ve always loved the written word, but sometimes my love has led me to pursue the word in lieu of the practical functions of it.

In any case, the newcomer was not asked to put his last name on his name-tag, and I found this unfair and launched into something of a tantrum. The memory is very foggy, but I recall my father coming and picking me up from the class. I know that there are inconsistencies with the memory, and I don’t remember the resolution, but I think my name-tag wound up getting updated but perhaps not by me.

The purpose of this example is that there’s a sort of embraced infantile trend in our society to be averse to chance. It’s not necessarily bad. I think that being averse to risk is very good, in the right context.

But the problem is that we align it to our notion of having what we want when we want it, and this is where things fall apart.

For starters, we don’t always get what we want by fortune alone, and some things may be denied to us because there is no circumstance in which getting them is feasible. I’ve given up on having a Ferrari, for instance, though I’m also a little scared of what trouble I might get into with a car that actually moves when you touch the gas pedal and perfectly happy with my early 2000’s Honda. My chosen means of making money (writing and teaching) doesn’t leave that as a viable life goal, but I prefer this to doing what I’d have to do to get a Ferrari.

The second thing with chance is that chance is not necessarily risk, and we’re prone to thinking about it.

The riskiest thing you can do is nothing most of the time. A lot of the time simple, very small actions can actually have positive results, but obsessing over the chance of something happening can make those positive outcomes fail.

I think I see this a lot in my personal relationships. I prefer to interact with a very small group of people who I’ve spent a lot of time with, and I tend not to form romantic attachments because I don’t like being rejected (I wanted a better way to describe this, but none came; it’s not just rejection, it’s also not fitting in or not having a purpose) or having unpleasant companions.

The consequence of this is that I don’t interact with all that many people, which in my line of work (or any line of work, come to think of it) is something that tends to have a negative impact on your performance and future.

I think that the take-away lesson to be had here is this:

Be a person of action. Seize the day, and take measured action to move toward a goal. Time spent in free-fall is time that you never get back.

Resolution

Act.

Chance is in all things. Risk is not. Don’t mistake uncertainty for danger.

Make a few new friends.

Reflections on Aphorisms #68

I’ve got a bad thing going on where I keep writing right next to bed-time, so it’s going to be another single aphorism night.

However, I Think this one is going to be interesting, even though the writer is anonymous. It’s an interesting point, though.

Aphorism 106

Clever liars give details, but the cleverest don’t.
Anonymous

Interpretation

Lies are a funny thing. They’re a difficult thing to do well, even though they come naturally to us.

A lie is an attempt to tell an alternative account than that which exists in the universe, and it’s something which is associated both with intelligence (since good liars need to be smart) and foolishness (because you can’t outrun reality).

One of the things that we notice is that people who are lying often go to great lengths to justify their lies, and people who are not will be very comfortable in telling a story that’s much more barebones.

I’ve studied how social engineers do things, and one of the things that’s really interesting is that they don’t actually try to tell good lies most of the time, even though they have to deceive people to do their jobs right.

Instead, they start with befriending people and only once they’ve gotten some territory will they actually tell a lie. When they do, they always keep it vague, and usually their stories pass muster. If you say there’s a problem with an elevator, for instance, that’s a lot better than saying what the problem is.

One of the things that this ties into is a sort of peculiar injunction to honesty. The best lies lack details because they can’t match reality (at least, not on purpose).

By leaving out details, you give enough room for the people on the receiving end to fill in the picture you paint. In a sense, you use a falsehood cloaked in the reality which is known to other people.

After all, how much do any of us really know about our surroundings? Probably not all that much, even if we’re trained for situational awareness. We have a lot of heuristics, however, and our heuristics are fairly broad so that we can adapt to as many situations as possible. You want to be flexible enough to manage almost anything, not left in the dust when the smallest change occurs.

The problem is that this provides a sort of extension of proto-reality, potential presents and futures that cover the space beyond our senses.

The diagram above indicates a sort of diagram of how I conceive the mind’s state in the universe.

It’s “not to scale” as it were, in the sense that I’ve chosen the angles to make the diagram neatly legible rather than as any sort of statement about how the mind works.

In the center you have the heuristic, and the heuristic would actually extend as a full circle and overlap with validation.

This is the way we think about the world.

Notice that the heuristic extends into the unknown; this is a reflection of the unconscious and the role it plays in shaping the psyche, and is where subconscious bias and other formative factors that we aren’t necessarily aware of play.

Part of the heuristics section is the validation. This is the place where our perceived current and past realities match our expectations. Although this appears to be getting broader, it’s worth noting that the degree to which this is actually part of our heuristics may be inflated by the fact that we are generally conscious of those things which we expect.

Again, the representation here is not to scale.

We have the expected future out front. This is where our expectations meet reality in a relatively accurate fashion. If I expect for the sun to come up tomorrow, and I am correct, then this is an assumption based on my heuristic that I can safely put in the expected future.

Think of this as the prediction spot.

Next you have the expected unknown (E.U. in the chart). These are the places where we know that something will happen, but we aren’t sure what. Although I’ve diagrammed this as a relatively small portion, I think that for many people, especially people like me who tend to navel gaze, this is actually a large part of our minds and heuristics. Think about it this way: I don’t know that my commute in the morning will be pleasant, so I plan for it being potentially painful.

Last, we have the blind unknown. To a certain degree this is shaping our heuristic, but it represents all of the past, present, and future that we are not consciously aware of. This is a place with very real meaning, but we cannot discern or decipher it. This is certainly under-represented on the graph. It should probably extend in all directions beyond the heuristic and known.

A good lie plays with the expected unknown. If I know that the elevator may break, and that it is important to keep it maintained, I will not question an elevator maintenance crew showing up at my facility once in a while. I may not even question them moving around, since they may have to talk to people to do their jobs. I don’t know this for sure, but it’s logical enough.

If the person who’s showed up to fix the elevator tells me that they’re there because the elevator keeps getting stuck on Floor 3 and they’re going to need to talk to Mr. Smith in his office, the lie has gotten a lot more complex. If someone says the wrong thing next time or if there is no Mr. Smith (or worse, no Floor 3), it will cause the obvious conflict with reality to pop to the forefront.

Resolution

Check my heuristics.

Don’t lie.

Don’t use information to obscure reality.