Uncertainty and Cause & Effect

There’s something tickling out there at the confluence of our refusal to accept uncertainty and our belief in cause & effect. Even here, as I ponder these two concepts, I’m falling into the expectation that relation equals cause. I was about to say that we refuse uncertainty – vehemently, violently, with suicidal insistence – because

Twists and turns…

…the story of a man who inadvertently got into the role of himself. He saw it as a mistake. That is what people say who fall into a hole. “Hell and damnation, I have fallen into a trap and the trap is myself.” They always treat themselves as the greatest mistakes ever made. Carl Jung,

Cause & Effect

The greatest difficulty when we turn our attention on something like Cause & Effect comes from the astounding inertia of conditioned assumptions. To make a case that Cause & Effect is an illusion is to put one frail voice up against thousands of years of common sense. This is why it’s so important to sort

Dissensus, Hygiene, Quality, Rhetoric, and Integration; a Stab at a Synthesis…

Dissensus is a tough master. If I choose to follow dissensus I pledge that though what I espouse holds no intent to violate any other, I will refrain from destroying anyone, though they espouse my destruction and this refusal might lead to my own death. I see no other way to make a break with

Complicity and Contingency

We live somewhere in tension between complicity and contingency. It’s not a linear polarity, this space. These are not categories with any sort of rough equivalency. Complicity is a state. We are within a relationship to the forces that seek to destroy. Some of these we are aware of, others are hidden from us, some

The Effect of Enormity

Enormity. It’s the realization of the weight and power of the forces arrayed against us. I hesitate to call it evil. I’m poking around whether the concept of evil is worth its weight. Let’s leave it as destructive forces…. What strikes me is that we tend to find it quite reasonable to respond to the

Questions of Conspiracy and Inevitability

We have certain beliefs about conspiracies. There are some we ascribe to, others we reject. Most of us are probably uncomfortable with the whole topic. It makes us squeamish. It is a sign of some sort of weakness. It’s one of the few remaining public taboos. While we’re encouraged to bare all without embarrassment, an

“Well, It Can’t Hurt?” Yes It Can! And Does…

“What’s wrong with striving? How can it possibly be bad to try? Isn’t it irresponsible not to?” We hear these cries, either around us, or internally, whenever we contemplate an alternative to striving. We ‘re tempted. We quaver. We cave in. Of course, “What harm could there be? It’s only prudent after all!” we say,

Compassion, the distance between Dialogue and Negotiation

Dialogue, negotiation, both sound reasonable enough! We can glaze over any differences and use them as synonyms, right? That’s how power insinuates its way into every relationship. In the wink and nod, in a silent conspiracy to agree not to say what we mean, to hide away our agendas and bask in the glow of

The Confusion Between Collapse and Failure

As more and more people begin to show an awareness that civilization is in danger of collapse, we are still struggling with what I think is an important conflation of two different mechanisms as if they were the same. Civilization is indeed in danger of collapse. I agree with those who say it’s been collapsing

The Landscape of Humility

This is the landscape of humility. We tend to jump to a call for humility when we see a great action of hubris out there in the world. It’s easy to cry out, “Shame!” and “demand” humility from the malfeasants at a time like this. When we do so, we skip right past humility into anger safely directed at some other. On the flip-side, we tend to feel some rising shame in ourselves and turn to some show of penance as a sign of our own humility. The self-consciousness and the mixture of piety and victimization we relish in at such times to guard ourselves from our humiliation – notice how in this context, all the rightness of humility evaporates in our self-justification. At such times we slip right past humility again into just another variety of self-serving behavior. In neither case do we inhabit humility, or truly promote its spread in this world.

the Mainstream’s Misunderstanding

This is where art comes in. It’s not in essays or speeches, all of which are so hard to distinguish from polemic by their very form, that minds can be affected. In fiction, in visual art, in poetry we have the best means of establishing a body of shareable “experiences” that begin to forge a new way of being in the world. These can have the effect of drawing people to them as opposed to simply setting up their defenses to resist new ideas. In an eagerness to misunderstand whenever someone hears that “poetry is the answer,” they will only see whatever form of art they personally dislike and find easy to discount. Probe a little deeper and there isn’t anyone who isn’t affected by poetry, of the kind they do open themselves to, by whatever name it goes by.