Amerika

If I had to name the one human disaster, this is it: not wanting to engage with reality.

You can do it any number of ways. You can create a false world called heaven; you can retreat to your apartment and music and internet; you can undertake surrogate activities; you can preach “it shouldn’t be this way” and smile grimly; you can insist on “real world activism” that doesn’t address the problem.

I find that elites run off to gated communities and then participate in Peace, Love, Rainbow Nation Happiness and Justice for All type activities — these are surrogate activities.

I find that metalheads bitch a storm about the world, go home and smoke a doobie, then trade Slayer bootlegs and claim it gives their lives meaning.

It’s all evasion.

For me — a man of words, a writer by day and night — I prefer to seek truth aggressively and then translate it for my fellow humans who haven’t had the fortune to undertake my path.

Truth is like a woman. If you contemplate her, and seek every detail to find a place in the architectonic whole that is her, you soon understand her. And you know when to leap and when to lunge.

Contemplation, or with a clear disciplined mind analyzing the situation according to the principles of the Scientific Method (hypothesize; test; modify; repeat) and then forming logical abstractions, can save us from the opposite — which is not unstudied action, but backward logic which uses abstractions to justify not engaging with the world.

I don’t think it gets clearer than that. Happy holidays, everyone.

ASBO

While this was designed for metalheads, I think it describes the situation for all of us.

We can withdraw, formulate false worlds whether secular or religious, or look directly at how our world works and act so that we adapt to it.

Almost all of my species are fleeing from reality in everything they do. I find it appalling we give them the vote, or consider their little blogs, bands, books, theatre, drama, and politics.

Intelligent beings should test all new information against reality and determine whether it is knowledge, or accurate according to the whole of reality, or bloviation, meaning that it is a partial truth — correct about one aspect, but by denying others, incorrect according to the whole.

As you go through your day, consider classifying what you encounter as knowledge or bloviation. It makes for amusingly cruel dismissals of the dimwitted but socially pleasing attempts of others, if nothing else.