"I love you," whispers the young girl.

"Do you love me more than anyone else, more than anything?" demands the boy.

"I love you...differently, because of what you are. Not more, not less-there's no comparison with love, for love cherishes what is. Love is not a judgment, it is measureless, matchless..." she replies- but he has already turned away.

----

We have been obsessed with comparisons, looking for what is best, for example Velvet Underground to Sonic Youth which is not as good as John Cage or the Plastic Ono Band. Because of this, we forget to appreciate the uniqueness of one individual to another by eclipsing the variations with the concept of the Ideal.

In an article written by Crimethinc[1] entitled "One Dimensional Life in the Three Dimensional World" they explained the present reality of the world we live and stated that our existence was reduced to mere symbols and ideals- a flat reality where everybody has to fit in a one dimensional world while making comparisons to check and balance the absolute flatness of it.

"We are truly one-dimensional thinkers: unable to see each individual quality or action for what it is alone, only able to apprehend it in terms of how it compares to others...the implication being that there is some fundamental scale against which everything can be compared."

It is true that we are actually living in a flat wall, waiting for the Shamans to color us. These Shamans are the living gods who owns and controls the Ideals which is fed to television, radios and government for us to sit and obey as they compass their hands.

But how did all this thing started? According to Crimethinc "It originated with language itself: where one word serves to represent many individual experiences, abstraction is already present."

The birth of Western civilization which occurred in Greece took the abstraction of language one step further by Plato- he declared that our abstractions has to be referred to some "higher" world of ideals in which everything has to exist in their purest form. Because of this, everything was turned backwards, placing our broad generalization before the experiences they are drawn from- making our real experiences unimportant and irrelevant.

This reality is very much present in Christianity which extended the philosophy of Plato. But this time, the ideal existed in Heaven, and the Earth was the flawed, evil imitation of it. A kind of doctrine that is against the Wisdom of bodily experiences.

But in Crimethinc's historical analysis, they pointed out how the doctrine of vague Ideals was slowly brought down to enforce the ideal upon the world of daily perception: "It began with the end of the barter system, and the beginning of subdivided time. Suddenly, everything had a certain set of value, and the day was divided into measured segments. Soon after everything was measured and calibrated: women's clothing sizes and body sizes for example has been described numerically- "36-24-36". Women now occupy a scale of value according to their measured weight. Some struggle with scales every morning, hoping their number will be lower so their value will be greater."

These measured ideals in the world of daily perception is seen through gigantic billboards along the highway of EDSA, streets of Tokyo and on the hills along Apitong road of Tacloban city.

People consume this kind of pursuit of "Ideals" which cannot exist in this world but a rejection of the real world, and thus life itself- as demonstrated by the sad fate of the bodybuilders and anorexics who take it to its logical extreme, the grave. As Crimethinc puts it "We need a language which we can celebrate through description, not comparison."

In conclusion, Crimethinc declared that abstractions, norms and absolutes are an assault of humanity and existence itself, therefore: "In doing so, we would finally have to accept and embrace ourselves exactly as we are, in all our diversity and variety, and free ourselves from the shadows of the false heaven of Plato and the Advertising agents, where "real" beauty supposedly resides. Liberated entirely from standards, from the lingering ghosts of Christian judgment and condemnation, we could see that what we are must itself constitute the measures and meaning of beauty, of dignity and magnificence, if such concepts are to exist at all."

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footnote:
[1]CrimethInc., also known by other names, such as CWC ("CrimethInc. ex-Workers' Collective") or Crimethinc, is more a mindset than an organization. It is a profoundly anticapitalist (as well as anticommunist), critical look at culture, politics, life, work, and a radical way of living one's life. It has been chiefly associated with the North American anarcho-punk scene. The name is a reference to "Crimethink" in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.