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This
is an offering, part 3
by marriah,
5th August 2001.
This is the story of how I discovered my calling in
life.
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Alas, it was not to
be. Every friend I encountered proved to be more and more distant in
space, time, or knowledge. I was accustomed to friendships from
childhood, where I would spend a great portion of the day playing
with someone and sharing information. I was used to spending a great
deal of time with siblings, or with parents, and talking with them
about their experiences or their perspectives on life. In fact,
during my childhood and teenage years, I had to make an effort to
get enough privacy to think about all the information I had gathered
from these conversations. But, after graduating from college, I
began to recognize a great distance that was being created between
all my friends. No one expected much social contact, no one expected
anyone to make any extra effort at social contact, and when there
was social contact, no one expected anything from it. In a sense, I
saw my friends willingly putting up walls around themselves in an
effort to pursue relationships and careers.
I didn't
understand any of this because there would be no possibility to sort
through my research if I had no way to socially process it. I would
meet a person expecting to have continuous contact with them for the
next several years, which meant that I didn't have to pile on all my
information in the beginning. But, instead the meetings I had turned
out to be the only ones I actually experienced with them. After one
meeting with a person, there was little if any contact with them,
and any future contact was at most casual. What I began to realize,
after speaking with several friends, was that (a) people thought
that too much time spent together was not good unless one was
planning on being married or was in great need of social contact,
and (b) one shouldn't expect too much from other people.
This view was confirmed from various books I read, which
discussed the proclivity of my fellow citizens to seek isolation and
aloneness, for the sake of privacy. Such books as "Pursuit of
Loneliness : American Culture at the Breaking Point", by Philip
Slater, struck my attention. So, I began to ask myself why this was
occurring, and one answer I discovered, while reading such books as
"Nonzero", by Robert Wright, was that people tended to avoid each
other because they feared a clash of egos, and they tended to
congregate only when it benefited them personally. In fact, the
spiritual literature I read discussed how humans are bad, and that
one should not turn to them for any guidance, or that even if humans
are not bad, one should be self-directed, and not turn to others for
direction in life. Thus, I began to sense the idea of personal
autonomy as a fundamental dynamic in my friendships, and I began to
recognize this from all parts of my life. I saw how my friends in
school tried to break free of parental control, and sought to be
independent. I saw how most of my friends wanted to live their own
lives, without anyone interfering.
Yet, I still could not
understand this impulse, because I had never understood the need to
be autonomous. I understood only the need to be a good person, and I
saw autonomy as preventing a bad person from making you bad. But I
didn't see autonomy as something intrinsically good. My image of
myself had been created by the simultaneous influences of my
parents, especially my mother, father and stepmother, who lavished
praise on me for good behavior, and my teachers, who lavished praise
on me for good grades and good writing. So I thought the only thing
one needed to be concerned about was being a good person, and having
other people recognize that. In fact, if people weren't praising me,
I thought something was wrong with me, which meant I had to work to
improve myself. But, if they were praising me, then I felt free to
do as I pleased since I was already perfect. And I perceived
everyone else as perfect as well. The only issue was getting
everyone together to share our greatness and expand it, like a
balloon that grows bigger the more you blow into it. I understood
the autonomy or freedom impulse to be the product of people trying
to show themselves to be perfect by making others look worse, or by
ignoring other people.
So, I saw myself surrounded by people
who didn't have the slightest interest in getting together with me
to share my information. And, if anyone did have an interest, they
always approached it with the wrong premises: that humans weren't
perfect and never could be; that humans weren't omniscient and never
could be. Thus, I saw myself surrounded by three types. One type was
prone to think about life, but from a very cynical perspective,
thinking that truth and perfection existed, but only in some
spiritual entity such as God, Jesus, Buddha, or some other such
figure. Thus, if we got together to share information, we only
communicated what we knew about these figures. Anything I said was
entirely contingent on my acknowledgement of these spiritual
figures. Otherwise, they wouldn't take me seriously. Another type of
person was also prone to think about life, possibly from an
optimistic perspective, but with the acknowledgement that absolute
truth doesn't exist and that we create our own truths.
Thus,
while they would share information with me, they would only
acknowledge their own personal truth as their guidance, not any
truth that I pointed to. They wanted me to live my own life, not
tell them how to live their life. The last type wasn't prone to
thinking very much about anything, except how to have as much fun
and pleasure as possible. So any information I shared with them was
completely useless.
One thing I began to recognize was that my
perception of progress and striving was quite invalid. By this I
mean that I strove to "catch up" with everyone else, who I perceived
to be chasing truth and perfection in one form or another. I
constantly compared myself to others, during junior high, high
school, and college, thinking that I had to either be a leader, in
front of the pack, or at least be amongst the followers who were
going in the right direction. I was constantly afraid that I did not
have the inherent abilities to be great in any way. As far as I saw
myself, I didn't have the intelligence to discover great things,
because no matter how much I tried, no one listened to me. But other
people were being listened to. So I thought that I must be missing
something.
Why was some professor, or writer, or thinker
capturing an audience's attention, and not me? I perceived everyone
to be pursuing perfection in some form. If a baseball player, such
as Cal Ripken, were all of a sudden praised, I thought there must be
something special about him to merit praise. If I could do what he
did, I would be praised as well. Every time the Dow Jones Industrial
Average Increased, I perceived it as a way for people to get rich so
that they could begin discussing life's issues. If a movie won
several awards, I thought there must be some intrinsic quality they
were cherishing, and advocating as a way of life for everyone. In
essence, I saw everyone speeding away from me, going toward great
things, and I constantly beat myself over the head to catch up with
them. What was it that made anything special, or interesting?
In
thinking this, I automatically took the view that people were
deliberately chasing truth, and that if they weren't paying
attention to me, it was because I wasn't speaking truth. I saw
everyone getting into a car for the sake of progress, and I did not
want to be left behind. Thus, I relied heavily on social contact to
bring me up to speed.
But, after interacting with people
time after time, I began to realize that the opposite was the case:
people weren't chasing after anything, but I was, and I was speeding
past them as I chased phantoms. It was as if everyone had stopped
the car, decided there was no journey to take after all, and had
simply got out to enjoy the surroundings. Meanwhile, I furiously
pedaled in my bike, thinking I was catching up, when in reality I
was zooming past. I saw such books as "Zen, and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance", which preaches the philosophy of existing
now, with your environment, and I learned about postmodern
philosophies proclaiming truth not to exist and progress to be a
misnomer. I actively rebelled against these ideas. I desperately
sought out people who were inclined to think, but think about
progress in a modern sense.
Two things happened to resolve
these issues. First, I was able to discover my true self so that I
didn't have to rely on interacting with other people to discover
what life was about. This occurred when I was at a retreat, right
before graduating from college. During the retreat, we were told to
go commune with nature. So I decided to resurrect my boyhood
activities, and climb a tree. But I fell about five stories from a
tree after trying to switch from one to another. (The branch snapped
with my weight.) I was unconscious for 30 minutes due to the pain in
my back, and during that 30 minutes my consciousness did what I can
only describe as a life review. I saw how I had interacted with
friends and family from home, and I made a vow to always be true to
myself. I was discovered by a fellow camper, and taken to the
hospital, where I shared my experience with some other people. While
I was in the hospital I had such pain in my lower back that I had a
hard time walking. I was also roommates with another patient who had
fallen through the ceiling of his dormitory onto some stairs. So I
talked with him to pass the time. But, one day I asked if I could
type to other people through the Internet, and they gave me
permission. Upon typing, I discovered that my back began to feel
much better. So good in fact that I could almost dance. I ended up
not being able to stay at the retreat for the rest of the week, but
I did go back one last time before everyone left.
So, I was
able to stay true to myself, but that also meant I was limited to my
own perspectives. So, I turned to science to help me sort through
all the information I had. There were three key areas that helped
me. One was Cellular Automata, which is the use of mathematical
equations to simulate and model patterns found in nature. I saw
Cellular Automata, as discussed in such books as "Mathematica," by
Stephen Wolfram, as representing my perception of humans. As I
mentioned before, I saw humans as computers running on particular
software. Well, the exact software and its consequences are the
subject of cellular automata. I figured that if you could take a set
of ideas, or principles, that any person uses to govern his or her
life, you could then continuously run the program in a variety of
settings to discover what the consequences would be, over a month, a
year, or ten years. I had already spoken frequently with people from
all age groups, and was thus quite familiar with the normal patterns
of life that people experienced. So, I figured that, using the
models of cellular automata, I could interpolate from any point in a
person's life and figure out where they had started, and what they
had experiences, or I could extrapolate from any starting point and
figure out what a person is likely to experience with a given set of
principles or ideas. I started with me, examining my history, the
ideas I had used, and the consequences of those ideas, to figure out
which ideas were most useful for me.
Cellular Automata went
hand in hand with Chaos Theory, where small causes in a system
translate into larger effects over a long period of time. The
central concept that applied her was positive feedback, or system
feedback. In turn, I also saw the use of mathematical fractals,
where small things have the same appearance of large things. A grain
of sand has the same contours of a mountain. This enabled me to
figure out, (a) which principles, exercised in private behavior,
would end up translating into larger social trends, and (b) how
people perceived morality and maxims, where a small behavioral
effect is translated into our minds, through myths and metaphors,
into descriptions of how society does and should work.
Next,
Game Theory helped me understand how people created maxims or
principles that translated into behavior. Finally, the analysis of
system effects put everything in perspective. The Book, "System
Effects" by Robert Jervis, explained how, in contrast to linear
systems, where input equals output, systems analysis describes how
input changes the environment so that the output is different, and
often contrary to the intentions of the input. This helped me
understand how behaviors, originating from implicit or explicit
intentions by humans, often translate into outcomes that are quite
different from what was expected, and sometimes contrary to the
intentions of people. Such sayings as "the road to hell is paved by
good intentions" were the source of inquiry about why good
intentions sometimes turn into bad results, or bad intentions into
good results. But, that was all from the perspective of a single
individual's intentions. I had to have a better understanding of how
people operated that wasn't confined to mathematics and computers,
but was based on psychology, which doesn't often follow paths
prescribed by mathematics or computers. The concepts from "The
Tipping Point : How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", by
Malcolm Gladwell, helped clarify the exact human dynamics of cause
and effect.
But, understanding how humans operated was
useless if I couldn't actually interact with other people. In this
sense, I perceived that I had the hardware until I graduated from
college, and spent all my time working on software. Now, with the
software much improved, I had no hardware. In fact, I saw all the
social activities I had been involved in through high school and
college being replaced by stodgy, ossified institutions, such as
universities, corporations, and political institutions. These were
inappropriate places for my to implement any software because no one
I knew in any of these institutions actually let anything from the
institutions affect their social life, in terms of who they married,
who their friends were, or what they did for fun. This was mainly
because these institutions had no emotional or psychological
interaction with us, as our families and friends had. Yet, I saw my
friends trying to get into these institutions to start careers. I
understood none of this because I didn't think live should be lived
in pieces, with friends in one place who know nothing about friends
in another places, where activities do not connect with one another,
and one is forced to switch from one mask to another. I had adopted
masks for the purpose of figuring out how people's ideas affected
their behavior. But none of the ideas in these institutions affects
anyone's behavior. So there was no reason for me to where a mask.
After graduating from college, I went into these
institutions to figure out exactly why they didn't affect peoples
behavior, or connect with them emotionally and psychologically. I
bounced from job to job with the intent of doing research. What I
anticipated was finding a business where all the people I knew were
interacting with each other as they had in college and other playful
environments. And in places I found the potential for this. But this
potential wasn't actualized. Instead, I found people sitting at
desks, very bored because they had nothing to do, or very bored
because they were doing tasks that had no relevance to anything else
in their lives. Even when people didn't get together to interact, it
didn't translate into long-term friendships and relationships. Thus,
as far as I was concerned, there was no reason for these jobs and
work environments to exist, since nothing long-lasting and personal
was being produced from them. I finally began to understand why
people hated work.
But, ironically, I noticed that while
people hated work, they couldn't stop from working. I discovered
that the reason for this was because all the social resources that
they had experienced in families or peer groups previously were now
encased in these institutions. All the friendships they had could
only be sustained by being together in the same space, and the only
areas that provided that for long periods of time were jobs. Since
jobs had a monopoly on people, the only other place to find a
community was in a church or family. But, often the happiness in the
family or community was dependent on financial resources, and those
were monopolized by companies as well. This meant people were forced
to work and be miserable, or, if they weren't working they were
lonely, and also miserable.
Yet, I knew that the jobs gave
people money for their labor, so people had the ability to share
resources outside of a work environment. The only thing preventing
this was the most onerous concept I knew of: the individual. I saw
people placing their own self-interests above the interests of
anyone else, except family members. And even in family members I saw
people exercising self-interest over spouses or siblings. This
self-interest translated into such ideas as privacy and ownership.
And autonomy and freedom were innately connected with this
self-interest. Thus, I sought to find out how the idea of
self-interest had been created. Why did the idea of the individual
even exist?
What I discovered was that "individuality" need
not exist, but there are certain reasons why it does. One reason is
that life seems to be more precious when seen through one's own
eyes. Something seems to be better quality when I have made it. For
some reason, my own ego seemed to be saying that my own existence
was the only reason for me to exist. In other words, people may not
value other intrinsically, but they certainly value themselves, and
anything that is produced from myself is thus intrinsically
valuable. Anything that is not intrinsically valuable, but valuable
nonetheless, is something that helps me for the moment, even though
I have not created it. Just as C. S. Lewis says in "Surprised by
Joy, Christians praise God just because God is so wonderful in his
existence. The inherent, and intrinsic qualities of God are what
make God special. And since people are the children of God, that
intrinsic quality extends to them.
Thus, the ego, my sense
of myself, is made special just by the fact that I exist.
I
noticed that most of the impediments to social interaction are the
fears that either (a) I will not be needed or recognized for my
efforts, or (b) that another person will destroy my special quality.
In this sense, every group interaction becomes a competition between
people to recognize and accept each other. In fact, Robert Wright
discusses the nature of amity, or friendliness, in "Nonzero",
pointing out that friendliness is usually the flip side of hating
someone or something else. A sports team comes together to defeat a
rival. A country pulls together to defeat another country, or to
defend itself. Siblings stop fighting each other in order to combat
a parent. In fact, even in politics, there is the saying that
"partisanship stops at the water's edge", which means that the
country should unite when dealing with foreign friends or enemies.
This often accounts for the rally around the flag effect during
wartime.
Even in evolutionary biology, scientists notice
that people come together to combat survival, but, once they
survive, they compete with each other, often forming different
camps. Thus, Wright points out that the law of the "conservation of
enmity", along with the law of the "conservation of energy" and the
"conservation of matter" are constants in the physical and social
universe. Thus, my fear of not being needed or recognized is
mitigated if I am needed to combat an enemy. As such, there are
constant dynamics involving the individual versus the society,
freedom versus authority, that we all face.
My ideal was to save
individual identity by storing it in a permanent idea that was
practical to everyone's life.
Thus, while Jesus is primarily
recognized by Christians for being the son of God, the Messiah for
the Jews, and the Savior of all mankind, Jesus is recognized more by
non-Christians for his words of wisdom, and for his ability to
spread a religion based on compassion through the Roman empire as
the empire fell. Thus, the practical consequences of Jesus'
teachings are much more important that the hypothesis that he is the
son of God, the Messiah, or a savior. In essence, I seized upon this
practical idealism and decided that every person could, in effect,
produce the same thing. Thus, replace Jesus with Buddha, Mohammed or
any other religious figure, and the principle would still hold:
every single person should be a religious figure to every other
person, by communicating ideas that we find valuable, and having our
names identified with those ideas. Thus, instead of having to find
community in a family, a business or a single church, a global
community would be available.
The only catch with this idea
is that, as Malcolm Gladwell notes in "The Tipping Point", the human
social memory isn't very good, and the intellectual memory is even
worse. The average person can hold only remember seven distinct
numbers, letters, or facts simultaneously. Otherwise we start
forgetting. And the average person can recognize only 150 people
personally, and have a relationship with those people. Beyond that
150, the only way to accomplish something is by having an official
title, such as Vice President, replace trust. What I have seen
around me is everyone pursuing official titles, without trusting
anybody, because we all live in such big cities or communities that
it is impossible to know everyone very well. There is not enough
time with jobs, and not enough space to meet regularly. Thus, my
emphasis is now on minimizing or ending work, destroying the
emphasis on titles and careers, negating personal career ambition
and replacing it with social ambition, so that everyone can start
relating again as if we were in a marriage or a blood-related
family. That means, the ideas we communicate to each other should
have the psychological and emotional force of family relations. I
intend for us to become personal gurus to each other.
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| Member Ratings |
| Member |
Date |
Overall |
Agree? |
Writing? |
Enjoyment? |
| anwer
sher |
06 Sep
2001 |
Absolutely
sensational |
n/a |
Don't touch
it! |
Standing
Ovation | |
| I intend
for us to become personal gurus to each other.
| |
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