I was the Problem
Thanks to Take a Squiz Photography for
the sad clown photo (license).
Those who've known me for a while might remember what a huge fan I was of "universal basic income," or UBI as we called it in those halcyon days along about 2013 or so. I even put a "banner" on my Twitter page, indicating it was something that needed to happen NOW and well, I was there to educate you.
I had lots of "rational" arguments for it. I won't repeat them here. For one thing, I'm only slightly less lazy than I was then and that would tire me out. For another, I'm suspicious of persuasion of all types. The first one fooled is the one making the arguments.
We do things because we want to. Then we find our "reasons." I'm not being pessimistic here. I want more understanding between us all, yes. But it won't happen if we keep approaching each other loaded up with our shotgun-shell arguments, ready to treat all comers as the undead.
The more of the world I see, the less of it I know. The greatest mystery is behind this face, sitting here with pursed lips, righteously banging out my Markdown in Vim.
The honest truth is, I wanted UBI because I didn't want to work. I wanted to be the first in line to receive it. And why shouldn't I?
I am a "creative." My thoughts, dribbled out here and there, are bound to improve the lives of many thousands. Therefore, if you pay me to sit on my ass until an idea strikes me, you have received a bargain.
Yeah. That's what I believed. The truth is, I still kind of believe that. That is, the idea is attractive.
Did I say this? Well, maybe I'd offer that sentiment "in jest," but only after deploying all my "shotgun-shells" about the perfidy of the moneyed powers. How the deck is so unfairly stacked against the downtrodden. About duty, about imperialism, naked racism. Hell, I'd unpack arguments from family dynamics about how pathology is "pushed" onto a scape-goat in order to avoid certain conversations. I'd speak of avatars, memes, the mythos, "the shadow," cycles of dependency.
I pointed a thousand fingers at "the powerful," and shed a million crocodile tears for the lost souls "at the bottom."
The whole time I was thinking about myself.
It's easier to do this if you don't actually know anyone "at the bottom." When you meet one, there is likely to be a kind of soft dissonance. An oblique intersection of angles that comes from long held assumptions that conflict with each other.
My errors have many causes. They are a tangled ball of string. I think I've identified the primary cause above: fear. Fear of discomfort. Fear of work. Desire to remain "unsullied" by the world. A stubborn belief that the world is dirty and I am clean. If the world behaves "well," it will help me to remain so. If it fails to do this, then it will dirty the cloak of me, and it will be entirely at fault.
Next time someone comes at you, eager to convince you to believe a certain way, to "hold things" in a way that make them feel better (they promise), consider how great the fear must be. After all -- there was once a chance. You and he were once children together, whose greatest concern was whether or not you could ride the bike down the hill once more before it got too dark and mom got mad.
But there are ways of thinking that compound the error. The first friend of error is abstract thinking.
Once you have a bad idea, there is no better way to make it terrible than to enlarge it by putting on your "thinking cap."
An individual who is in a bad way is there for a hairball of reasons: many his own, some inflicted on him by a brusque and unconscious world. Additionally, the "badness" of the vision of him is influenced by the psychic weather between you and the vision of him before you. He is partially obscured by the clouds of your own beliefs.
This doesn't stop a sharp cookie from forging ahead, though! You propagate your vision of him into a thousand copies, and sweeping statements will surely follow.
Whats more, that individual is inseparable from the moment in which you observed him. Much of your observance is observance of the weather around him -- the ever-changing conditions. It may well have been sleeting. In the sunlight of conditions two days later, he'll be another individual. But you used "abstraction" in that moment of observation. You learned at some point always to abstract! So you take a frozen moment and extrapolate from it, constructing new arguments from what you observe, failing to see that your accumulating "facts" have disappeared just as a storm does.
Combining the error of abstraction with a bit of solipsism, you invade his privacy by populating his head with your own ideas. Of course, it's not really his head, it's your model of his head. But this is disrespectful nonetheless.
If we are to live as individuals, we must grant sovereignty to each other. I used to laugh at cultures which were suspicious of images. For example, the "primitive" who didn't want their picture to be taken, because they felt you took something of theirs.
Well, didn't you?
What are you going to do with that picture? You will look at it. This village woman, with beautiful skin and unreadable eyes. You will populate her head with thoughts by trying to imagine her life. You'll look at her environment with your own eyes, then cast judgment on her for not doing something about it. Never expressed overtly, of course. It hovers in the contextual space of the image, just off-screen.
The problem with images is that they are too manipulable. They are "easy to grip." They can be combined in "interesting" ways. They'll be used like algebra to reach conclusions, from which action will follow as a summer storm follows intense heat. The woman in the village would be dismayed at the result if she could pop in a few years down the road to see what you used that copy of her for.
She might be shocked to learn how dirty she is. Or how noble and long-suffering.
Haven't we played this game long enough, you and I? We "readers," we "thinkers?"
In usurping the "throne" of this mans thought, I became deaf to any actual idea of him, constructed with his input and care. Yes, I admit I can't avoid making an image. However, I can be much more careful about it. I can be filled with the dread of error in the work.
Image-making should be a kind of triangle. A negotiation between the one observed and the observer. The image should rise above that confluence with lines of equal length. Then, even if all images are destructive, this one will be minimally destructive, because it was created in relationship, and relationship is our only real means of correcting mistakes.
Had I done that, back in the day when I lived in a cave of imagery built from my observances, stolen, as they were, without the consent of the observed, I would have seen that others didn't view "work" as I did -- as a thing to be avoided whenever possible.
Work, in the lives of some, is akin to breathing. It is a basic condition of existence, and a healthful one.
Imagine an alien that doesn't need oxygen to regulate and feed bodily processes. They would look at us with dismay:
"Every minute? Every single minute of life you must breathe?"
"Yes," you'd say. "It's not so bad. I still get things done."
The creature looked offended, but resigned to this curious life. "I suppose. It really seems a shame, though."
Work is a giving of oneself. It's an acceptance of finitude, which is often hard to bear, especially if you want to feel special.
I played my inner thought that "work is terrible," though the stereo systems of a million imagined people, and came to the only answer I could see. But I was holding everything wrong.
I was standing at the edge of the water of life, and arguing why no one should jump in.
Isn't it funny? My pathology, my "worst idea" about the nature of the world sent me running to change that world to "look like me." Was I a virus? I think that my behavior in this area of life did resemble one, yes.
These things are hard to see because we are more like hosts of a great dinner party. In one corner, insurrection is being planned. In another, the Nobel laureate offers pearls of wisdom. In the kitchen, staff works dutifully, but not for you -- for themselves.
Now, when I see people "running," my eyes narrow. I recognize the gait, the urgency. They are desperate to cover up a wound deep inside, which they can't bear to be conscious of.
It is our way to externalize all problems. It is not even bad. But it is certainly overused.
These days, there are many millions more incensed, desperate and furious at "the other." At the one who must needs change, and that right soon. When I felt this way, there was a constant refrain in my head: "Why does nobody see how benighted they are, how much harm they do to themselves and others?"
I know the future of these people: the world will harden against them, as it must, because there are bonds of love between us of which we are yet unaware. Love is firmness, at times. The mirror which apparent externality holds up to the faces of the desperate will finally show them what they need to see.
Or not. You see, I have abstracted again. I have imagined the "many thousands," and populated their thoughts. I am still the fool who wants to be paid to exist. But at least I know this, and pay myself no mind.
Re-centering my thoughts to one individual person, I can only say that when one is truly healed, shame departs. I await that day, because the joy of uncovering is great, and every one of us deserves the balm of truth finally revealed.
Seven years hence, likely. Our complexity works against us.