I am a creature who has been molded. I
think this is such an amazingly important insight and admission that
we collectively forgo in our understanding of the world and
ourselves. “You” hardly exist. You can throw together all of the
physical ingredients you want. You can appeal to metaphysical
nonsense to describe your spirit. You can point to the story of your
individual past that you believe looks nothing like anyone else's.
And yet you are still controlled and described by things so beyond
your control and outside your awareness, it makes me wonder how an
“ego” ever managed to evolve in the first place.
As a molded creature, it gives you
varying degrees of leeway in taking responsibility for your actions.
I think it's significantly easier to be an adolescent or just
transitioning into an “adult” for you to recall moment after
moment where you didn't feel you had control. Parents or school
dictated something. Your hormones drove you crazy. It was your first
experience with an illicit substance or you'd never seen enough of
some show or interpersonal scenario to be bored to tears. While no
one wants to admit it, if you took a functioning alcoholic who knows
how to drive home drunk everyday, and hasn't been in an accident for
15 years, he's arguably more responsible than the teenagers who might
try to do the same.
What makes that above example difficult
is what I refer to as an “either/or fundamentalism” that haunts
all discourse and infects those who don't critically think or
comprehend slivers of important differences. An either/or
fundamentalist, never simply says, but screams, “Drinking and
driving is bad! It will get you killed! It's irresponsible!”
They're born into a time where .08 is the rule, and never knew any
different. They got the school PSA and targeted commercials. They
might have a deeply touching tale of how alcohol affected their life
personally or in their family. And ultimately they'll be making a
conservative appeal to the cultural lawful norm.
The person who watched their uncle not
only climb the ranks at work, but manage to have a loving family, and
never get a ticket, let alone in an accident, is going to know that
there's at least one person who can do this whole drunk driving and
life thing better than the average duck. I'm not saying we should
create rules in service to the one person who can do it differently,
or better. I'm saying every attempt to codify life and delineate
acceptable modes of behaviors has lines and exceptions. We routinely
pretend they don't, but nature is probabilistic, not fatalistic.
The way to describe this is to just
call it, “the catch.” Gun violence is hot right now, kids
marching in the streets, change coming around the bend. The catch to
rah rah motivated ignorance on the reading of the 2nd amendment? Dead
kids and extremely weak and hateful professions from rich white
pundits. I'm proud of these kids, and I hope they get what everyone
wants. Will it come with a catch? Of course. They're getting attacked
personally. They're kids, so if you listen to the wrong ones speak
for too long they start to sound like dumb kids. This isn't something
I'd belabor them for because everything said on FOX is worse than the
C and D-est of students might blurt out. But having a voice, creating
a change, and taking responsibility at any level always has loose
threads that will catch.
Age has forced me to confront the
catches that came with my idealism. The world, for most people, seems
to “get by.” People are engaged in what they don't understand,
for indeterminate amounts of time, around people they generally
dislike, and occasionally drinking or a safe space is created for
them to pretend to work through the cramps of their existences and
neuroses. In general though? They're meeting “professional” and
“polite” versions of what I like to say out loud. They're bumping
between self-involved and precariously placed balls of fear and
insecurity who've hollowed out a place within to keep bothering at
all.
These husks. These nodes. These
“masses,” were conditioned. Someone took their imagination and
future in defunding their school. Someone polluted the air so they'd
get sick and sad. Someone voted against measures to take care of
them, and give them options, and ensure the future of the species was
in the right hands. Their parents might've mistreated them. Their
brain might genuinely have something wrong with it that ensures
they'll never breach a level of understanding or reach a “baseline”
example humanity might consider healthy. From the socks they wear,
to the songs on repeat in their head, more went into crafting them
than a million allegedly intentional decisions over years is going to
erase.
I say all of this as someone who tries
to be intentional. I try to account for and describe the background
that is so consistently, so reliably so despotic and angry to how
I've been molded to respond to the world. This whole exercise, the
vast majority of people HATE it. They hate the idea that you might
speak at length. They hate that you might believe or arrive at
something through the annoying process of sitting down to think it
through. They hate that you have more reasons and evidence and
direction, and they hate you even more when they can't see it or
understand it. They hate your tone, your examples, your metaphors,
and your word choice. They hate that you tried. They hate that they
think they've thought all this before! And where do you get off
telling them anything, asshole? And they don't accept that their
hatred is as conditioned as much or moreso than the environment
they'd maybe like to escape where they didn't need to hate so much or
so often.
I'm a deliberately challenging person.
I know the language of politics and body language. I know how to look
and sound the part. I know how to point my language to mirror what I
think is your intelligence or interest. I know, to the letter, to the
word, the difference between “rambling” and “ranting” and a
diligent exploration of an incomplete or ongoing idea. I've written
research papers, and while extremely drunk. I've endeared myself to
hundreds, and provoked “get help you idiot” in a thousand
different ways. The point being, in our interaction, I've already
taken responsibility for what I said or how I said it. Why do I know
how you're going to respond? I don't know you personally, I just know
there isn't someone there. I know the environment you're responding
to, because I've been incredibly molded too.
The catch of being deliberate is that
nobody can tell. People use the exact same words in the exact same
scenarios, irrationally, in a panic, when they're projecting, when
they're feeling insecure, and when they're lazy as are afforded to
you. And just because you're trying to be deliberate, it doesn't mean
you can always stay that way all of the time. You'll get tired.
You'll slip up. You'll fuck something up in a magnificent way that
calls upon the God of Comeuppance to embolden the smirks of your
critics. Think you're smart? There's a list of every stupid thing
you've ever said or done in someone's back pocket. Think you've
figured something out? Who better to come into your life than the guy
who always knows just enough more than you to try and make you feel
bad about it.
We have a “competitive”
capitalistic culture. The roots of our competition are literally
inherited tools to mete out life and death in a violent and confusing
environment. In a blink of an eye we're expected to get educated,
keep up with the world of creative endeavors, and emotionally
regulate? The comment sections online didn't happen in a vacuum,
because the people writing them didn't develop under anything less
than masked violence and death of one measure or another. Death of
their ideals. Death of the concept of a healthy family or dreams.
Death of an ability to appreciate their own place in the world or
ability to be of any consequence in it. They don't believe the
negative consequences anymore than the prospect of positive ones.
They don't see a catch, because they don't know they're the living
embodiment of one.
So what do you do with the catch? Do
you want to turn to a self-help book that lectures you on “grit?”
Do you want to give up and rot in your meaningless existence as you
fire up the video games again? Do you want to rest on your laurels,
also conditioned, for enough kids to die or disaster to strike before
someone gives you an excuse to make a sign? It's not clear what any
one person will do in response to the inevitable catch.
I build it into my personality. I can
play politician, but I'm not one. I can speak what you consider to be
wildly inappropriately, but it's serving my purposes. I can let
anyone willing to honestly inquire or share in my motivations. In
these times, to individuate, is to breath. It's to pause and listen
and ask questions because you're recognizing that the neurons aren't
firing and connecting like you might really want them to. It's to
swallow the hard truths of what our environment is doing to us, and,
if forever modestly and practically hopelessly, try to do better.
When the “haters” and “crazies” talk ad nauseum, or even take
over your government, you step back. The fix isn't to be like them
with an illiberal drumbeat of incoherence. It's to understand and
modulate them. It's to take control of your base tribalism and
instincts, and move the ball around the field before you take a shot
on goal.
I'm literally trying to develop
different fields. There's a field to build and play with things on.
There's a field of people I'd like to be able to talk to and rely on.
There's fields of interest where I want to be in the loop. There's a
mental field I want to romp about that allows me to persist in my
goals and interests without too much fuss and distraction. The
unifying point and understanding that belays them all is that it's
deliberate. I talked it out. I wrote about it. I ran experiments
trying to do it differently. I continue to question the degree in
which I should engage at all or in one area over another. It's work.
It's time. It's necessary, and it's worth it.
Ru Paul recently on The Daily Show said
he realized a long time ago he couldn't change nobody's mind and if
he gave a shit what people thought about over all these years, he
wouldn't be sitting there right now. His sentiment is one I've
struggled with for a while, because I conflated it with what I
considered the “bad” kind of selfish. I think humanity has big
looming threats that need more attention paid to them that we'd
rather offer to a TV show about cross-dressing. Can you revel in the
light of your “best self” that cares to indulge like that,
watching or participating, while the ice melts or insane people hint
at nuclear war? I have a hard time not adopting my piece of the
collective stress we should have about that. We should be able to do
both, not give a fuck about “haters” and advocate from our
platforms or indulgences on how to do it better, but that's not
really what I see.
I see people in their “attitude
realms.” Once you're the “other” or “wrong” or “stupid”
there is no redemption. Catch the wrong first comment on a reddit
post? Here's a hundred upvotes to their damming sentiment about you.
Provoke someone's resentment over your subject matter or tone? A
self-righteous environment who didn't come here to be challenged or
read revolts. Forums are this visible micro-chasm of the sea of
influence we operate offline, and you can watch it play out in real
time, and you can still not be persuaded that your mood and attention
are hardly ever your own.
You should just know that you're never
woke. You're never right. You should never be comfortable. You
haven't figured anything out. You can't fix things. And when you try,
you're automatically fucking something else up, even when you aren't
aware of it. You can be like me, and be bored with the response you
decided to actually read from the world, or you can react. You can be
“surprised” shit begets shit, or you can build the shit into your
disposition and prospects. Feel all day. Feel and react and be a
normal human, but don't think anyone has a clue to how you respond to
yourself besides you. Don't let yourself off the hook if you
absolutely know you've no right to indignant condescension by
starting the “conversation” with “fuck you, idiot.” Maybe you
meant it. Maybe you're just at another peak of the endless hateful
wave from your survival system being co-opted by forces we don't much
understand.
I may not care what people think, but I
care why they think it. Empty insecurity won't persuade me to change
my approach. I can distinguish between projection and valid
criticism. I have the patience to dissect line by line or word by
word if the truth springs forth from the bottom. “People” or “the
masses” or you when you're too tired or lazy or hungry or hurt, do
not retain that capacity. So try silence. Try again later. Try to
figure out the catch before you hand yourself over as the catch to
someone who's bothering to try harder than you. You're not going to,
because that's the catch of advocacy, to betray your naivete and
provoke the opposite response, but you can't rob me of my deliberate
understanding and decision to appeal to those better than you. And in
never allowing yourself to acknowledge why there are those better
than you, you'll ensure the environment that molds us all is mostly
dictated by the mediocre sea.
My voice and accomplishments are
destined to fail, but at least they'll be mine as far as I was
willing to look for them. Catch.
