The Reverence of Snails

This is a cliche story, you've been alerted. It's a small story of existential angst, a mountain out of a molehill.

We have pet snails.  I'd say my daughter has pet snails but my rules say that whomever does the cleaning also gets to claim parents pride.   Yes, I do the cleaning of the snails just as I used to clean up after all the family dogs and then graduated into the diaper czar for my own kids.   I could probably write some Freudian thesis about why I end up cleaning up shit/abhor shit but that's for another day. Today's story is about life and purpose, not shit.

Our household awoke simply, nothing awry other than my stuffed up left nostril.  I laid up longer than usual avoiding acknowledgement of the days tasks.   Prone, CNN in the background, I read some pages in a book about artists as art, not their actual art as their art.  It is a slow book with mildly entertaining but mostly selfish ideas.  And so the procrastination ran its course and I brewed some espresso.  There was work to be done.

The aquarium sooted and slimed up from weeks of snails snailing lurked in my daughter's room.  It took me a long time to cross the room and approach my duty.  The espresso had not quite done it's own work and my eyes hadn't yet come online - a blur of fatherly motion.  In the kitchen, clean soil obtained from storage, I unhinged the snail habitats lid. Lots of little globules threatened my morning.  And then life hit me in the face doing what espresso couldn't - a revelation.

"GUYS GET IN HERE!  GET YOUR MOTHER!"

Various feet made their way to the kitchen with slightly frightened looks draping their faces. 

"WE HAVE SNAIL BABIES!  LOTS OF THEM,"  horrification gasped out of me.   

Cute little creatures, shells barely solidified, roamed the vast landscape of their birth.  The strategy of their lives unfurled - a strategy of quantity and swiftness.   In an unimaginably short time we went from having 3 lethargic adult snails binge watching lettuce wilt to having a hundreds strong legion of translucent, vibrant survivalists.   

[The strategy is beautiful.  In the darkness of night when your parents are asleep not paying attention hatch as many youngbloods as possible and let them scatter as they form households around their bodies.   

The strategy is also sad, in a way.  It is a strategy the assumes death.   The strategy was not chosen but it was selected for snails by the consequences of the natural world over time.  It's a confusing, and not human-like, strategy for species survival where the species, the colony and the individual are in a very different dance than humanity's.  The strategy is very successful - land snails have been figuring out the world for over 350 million years, sea snails for much longer.  So many things about snails are terribly clever and interesting and gorgeous and affirming.  

see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10074/ :  "First, the cleavage planes are not parallel or perpendicular to the animal-vegetal axis of the egg; rather, cleavage is at oblique angles, forming a “spiral” arrangement of daughter blastomeres. Second, the cells touch one another at more places than do those of radially cleaving embryos. In fact, they assume the most thermodynamically stable packing orientation, much like that of adjacent soap bubbles. Third, spirally cleaving embryos usually undergo fewer divisions before they begin gastrulation, making it possible to follow the fate of each cell of the blastula."  

also consider that snails have no gender for a given individual (any given snail has both sets of reproductive organs) and all can lay eggs after mating.  Courting mates is all by touch and sliming each other.* ]

We couldn't maintain a habitat with hundreds of snails.  As the cleaner, my task deepened. First, we all had to come to grips with parting ways.  My wife and I moved quickly knowing that attachment grows quicker than even a snail - once a name comes to mind a bond forms.   I announced the plan immediately. I was to release the snails into the pseudo-wild of the protected marshes here in Marina Del Rey and let nature play its games.  We would retain two babies.

"Pumpkin, is that one's name."

And a child was born.

I prepared mentally and physically arming myself with paper towels, cups of water, and a small spoon.  The spoon would be the official vehicle of snail freedom.   Marching in the bright, winter sun I noticed people and their dogs and their kids.   I noticed leaves and cars and a trace of clouds.  I noticed the smell of streets and the line of ants.  I spotted an opening in the fence in which to escape and release my prisoners.   

The Snail Freedom Site

The ground considerably drier than the lush soil of the habitat seemed a downgrade as far as conditions go.  Ants overran the bristling leaves and dusty dirt, busy with their nation building.  Would these ants attack these refugees?   Would the ants' changing paths signal predators I could not see?   How many ants and snails and microbes did I squish underfoot en route?  how many strategies did I unlock in these efforts?   what contingent responses unfurled upon my shoes and my skin?  did the parents of all these babies sense anything with their slime disconnecting with every spoonful I poured onto the earth?

I covered the emptied soil with the found natural debris.  It was gravelike - a mound, but concealed.  An opportunity to commune while disappearing into a different world.   Disruptive but giving.

When I glared up at the sun from that life-giving graveyard it struck me that reverence, even in glossy cliche, is a life-affirming.  The world is contingent, full of competing strategies for survival, full of sacrifice and contradicting stances of individualism and society of creation and destruction - and all gradients in between.  No species lives in isolation, no individual of a species lives independent of the backs of others, no species is above or below.   I could not avoid the destruction of all the snails babies nor the hundreds of insects and other organisms I probably killed on my cliche ritual of setting pets free.  But I can live in reverence of their being, humbled by their place in this world, and my shared place.  It is my responsibility to honor them.  This story honors the lovely, little snails and their ability to turn celery into spiraled shells.   

What is a painting? What is a poem? What is a program? What is a person?

Where exactly do we find the IT of painting, poem, program or a person?  An intrinsic, contained whole?  an experienced essessence?

These are the biggest questions of all, the questions that inform the whole of politics, religion, science, humanities, culture, family, education and identity itself.

Consider an alien from a far away galaxy arrived here or near earth wondering what exactly is at hand.   Suppose the alien doesn't have eyes or ears or fingers or anything like humans or humanlike animals.  This alien lacks computers like ours, meaning none of this alien's computers/perceptive tools run our biology nor our operating systems.  What exactly would earth and humans and our artifacts be?  What would our poems and our programs and our paintings and our people seem "like" to an alien?

There would be no decoder key overtly explaining or making sense of any of the human experience for any such decoder would be written / described within the very objects the decoder decodes.  Our natural language, color theories, agile programming methodologies, data types, frames, etc would not make any sense at any level standing alone. An alien would literally need to learn humanity from the ground up.   And it's not even clear whether learning natural language, human behavior patterns, visual systems or bits and bytes would be "the ground" from whence to go up.

Why is alien ignorance the case?  Is there a conceivable reality in which this ignorance isn't the case?   The only possible case to be made is that of ideal or universal or at least beyond human forms/ideas/information.   While it is impossible to rule out completely the possibility of ideal forms/universals it seems incredibly improbable consider the fact that no two humans will ever agree on what exactly we mean by a painting, a poem, a program nor even a person is.  In fact, that's exactly why we have these expressions and their, well, expressions.   Whatever the existence of a poem is it is more than it's commonly stated rules and favorite examples.   Paintings have battled their own existence since ancient hominids traced pigment and scratched rocks on rocks.   Programs, while wholly invented by humans mostly in our lifetimes, have no full expression of their behavior.   A person who does all these other ill-defined things cannot possibly be defined by the infinitude of its ill-defined activities.

The situation for exact knowledge and clear definitions is worse though.  Even formulations/simply ideas/systems we've created entirely are not free of unlimited ignorance of their essense.  The halting program and incompleteness theorem in mathematics and computer science, our most exacting disciplines of creation, thwart, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt, any idea that we can know to the full extent all things, except the most simplistic.  

This entire essay is probably not convincing.  The human apparatus isn't set up well for ignorance and the unknown.   Our biology seems to gravitate to pattern recognition and this, in turn, leads our institutations to peddle in the same.   We all teach each other that We Can Know, We Must Know, We Will Know, despite the fact never has this actually be proven nor empirically been shown nor even lasted with the most fundamental faith ideals.  It makes sense, to some extent, that we wish to know and even believe we can know considering what it seems the value of knowing would be - if we knew, we could control or at least come to grips.   Even that is a bizarre baseless notion once we dig into it.   Anything within the limits of knowing is so simple it's uninteresting and in almost every case is fading or short lived.  Find a case and surface it, please!

Yet, it is still interesting or motive to try to explore and identify these things, as aren't we all doing these activities? or being these things?  any and all?

My own response to these questions is simply... I don't know but I'd like to keep finding out what it is.   And I even reject the idea of I.   I take it as a given that I'm exploring paintings, poems and programs not for the person that is me, but for the persons I am and am connected to.   I don't paint my paintings or write my poems or create my programs.  What tinkles from these fingers someone else's DNA made and someone else's skill trained is a shared activity of connectivity.  

And so.

There remains only inquiry and more inquiry.  That is what all is not.

Until the aliens tell all myselves otherwise.

Wholly Inconsistent or Another Theory of The Drone or How Learning Leads to Terrible Things or Becoming Human, Again.

Author's Note:

This essay may require extended vocabulary and attention not available to readers depending on their current environment and access method.  The author recommends taking a deep breath and composing the body for a period of concentration.  The author recognizes this may be an investment without a monetary return and thus should not be done by those who literally measure time as money.

We - in general as the social, language, and art prone human species - profess ideas to test them with an audience - first our own self as the audience, then others.  If the experiments succeed by not getting us into serious trouble - however we perceive trouble - we integrate the response feedback into our bodies but not necessarily the "the truth" of the professed ideas.  For the most part we don't understand and appreciate thoughts, words, pictographs and any resulting behaviors as correlate and not equivalent.  We confuse coincidence of expression with consequences - this is a side effect of phenomena of learning.  Learning and adaption is a wonderful ability but also has terrible consequences if not constantly re-evaluated and embodied in a direct, real, physical engagement with the world.

The Profession of Politics and Its Goals

The dissonance of thought to behavior is politics and it thrives on the lack of critical, embodied thinking.  Politics cannot be anything other than the complete mis-association of rhetoric -> external truth and bodies -> accidental outliers.  Politics does not exist outside of that notional association.

(Some readers tend to prefer examples of the professed logic in action: When a brain/body combination that does not include direct attachment of a uterus [the most common "male" body] that brain/body combination can only speak and legislate about the fate of uteruses [the most common "female" body] from a false belief in truth beyond the uterus. A non-uterus bearing body has almost zero claim to actual knowledge about uteruses.)

(("male" and "female" are quoted above due to the fact that even those gender dichotomies are politicking.))

The feedback loop of political existence leads to a partially consistent experience of the world for individuals and groups of individuals.  This partially consistent experience involves the brutal destruction of life and liberty which must be professed away for those the politicking individuals and groups to continue to exist.  It cannot work any other way for the mis-associated politicians. As long as consistency is the external truth above all ideas and efforts the mis-associated thoughts->behaviors->consequences must be made to be consistent by any means necessary, including but not limited to, ignoring new consequential data, cutting off new perceptive pathways, and forming logical infrastructure that reinforces the ignorance.

(Some readers, but not necessarily the same readers referenced in the first parenthetical note, may desire more direct language.  Politics only aim is for its own survival.  A political entity does not have as its goal anything other than the thriving of the political entity.  All political systems - education, government, religion, corporations, an online social network - exist by mis-associating their rhetoric (the things people profess) with real world behavioral consequences (the things people actually do).  The mis-associations must be propped up with logical frameworks like political theory, economics, etc to make sure that only the data that supports the politic is perceivable and integrated.

The logical frameworks directly extend into technology - the technology is the body to the mind of the logical framework.  This is why we - as the American industrial-military-education complex - use drones more and more to do our killing, our delivering, our manual labor, our financial transacting and more and more our learning.  The drones disembody us from the world and ensure that our political activity can be fully consistent in its logic of mind-body duality and eternal truth - "the body was not harmed during the making of this politic." 

Another example, the "likes" and "pins" and "favorites" drive the eternal truth of the online feed that drives the embodied feeling that something actually happened during the reposting and liking of a thing that someone, possibly a drone, originally authored and posted.  And now the billions of dollars made from the liking of all the droned online behavior will be dispersed into more political survival of the liked activity.  {{Apologies to some readers for the last sentence in which irony and subtly was deployed as a test of concentration and ability to cogitate on recent events in the world and possible relations to this text.}}

One more example may be appreciated: fiat currency/modern money.  State backed (which is really just military might backed) money is one of the original technologies to embody a partially consistent, logical framework of disembodiment.  State created and backed anonymous currency - paper currency - turned non-anonymous electronic system of credits and debts used to exchange goods and services and ultimately to has as its sole aim to maintain the survivability of the state/entity backing the currency. The value of an exchange is not directly the goods or services exchanged and their embodied effect on the exchangers but rather the currency value over time of that exchange.  Two keys to the logical framework of that technology and its disembodied false associations of real value: the original anonymity encourages exchange activity and once that activity is sufficiently high the anonymous becomes known through ledgers.  Ledgers - records of debts and credits - becomes the controlling device of which political rhetoric survives - which exchangers of goods and services survive and which fail according to who best serves the backing politic.  It turns out, the more disembodied the exchangers the more the backing politic wants and needs them.  {Strange financial only entities, insurers, lobbying entities}

)

This political existence becomes its own destruction - once the politic completely disembodies its political members and becomes the ultimate, eternal truth of its own making - pure rhetoric - the bodies die and can no longer give themselves up to the rhetoric.  A political system as such has only one possible avoidance of that fate - to create new bodies (repeaters of the logics) that do not die in their total disembodiment of the contingent world.  The current non-aware computers and drones are excellent candidates for such bodies.

Critically Embodied Activity

Critical thought is an embodied behavior - it is wholly of the body and the body's immanent environment mashed with its lossy memory.  No thought, an "inner" thought or outwardly expressed blabbation, is independent of the body of the thinker and the contingent environment.  In opposition to the political the critical has embodiment as its aim - not consistency.  Embodiment does not have rhetorical eternal truth at its core.  Embodiment embraces the illogic of the immanent and does not force a logical, technical framework on the world.

Critical embodiment is not an active resistance but it is responsive engagement.  The activity of critical embodiment makes no claims about truth or of truth.  However, when supported by embodied evidence critical thinking does make claims against truth.  In this regard critically embodied engagement with the world is wholly inconsistent - it moves between the illogic of contingent relations  - between bodies and the expelled ideas/expressions of bodies - resisting resolution when the resolution is unwarranted by traces of non-equivalency.  Critical embodiment embraces contingent sustainability over eternal thriving of rhetorical truths.  There is nothing to seek but everything in its embodied, contingent engagement. 

(Some readers, who have made it this far, likely request a reprieve from possible solipsisms and the boring academic tone.  Basically there's an existential battle between the political and the critical - the rhetorical and the physical - the talkers and the doers - the Platonists and the hippies - the idea of eternal, absolute truths and a completely contingent reality. 

Far from a binary world, this battle is a gradient, a balance between the various extremes.  Both extremes EXIST but both extreme's are not the truth and one of the extreme views/ways of being is not survivable by its very definition... hint: political systems and rhetoric.)

Political systems and their technologies (all technology really) are based on the notion of eternal truth - there is absolute morality, predictability and control, absolute justice, right/wrong, good/bad, equality and inequality, equivalences.

Critical thinking involves assuming no eternal truths and behaving accordingly - always engaged in awareness and learning more.  Critical thinking seeks to guard against the misfires of learning - the mis-association of coincidental expressions, events and histories.  It does this directly by questioning everything, including itself and any of its methods.  Critical thinking is of the body - of the physical world.  It has no aims only flow of awareness from one embodied activity to another.

Art, crafts, swimming, writing, theater, climbing, foraging, campfires.... and an endless stream of touching the world activities are critical activities.  As is discussion, conversation, socializing, eye gazing and all other manners of connecting through various perceptive modes in the flesh.  To be embodied in anothers world... non-linear, non rhetorical activities.  The stuff of living.)

The Critical Question

The political cannot survive if humanity is to survive.  Political systems must always be temporary, local activities that dissolve as soon as they terminally disembody their members.  Politics is disembodiment - that is its activity, not just its aim.  It must divorce the ideas from the body in order to direct the flow of bodily resources (labor into military into property into currency into technology...).

Political systems and the profession of politics are an unavoidable emergent side effect of a hyper-aware, social, learning species.  Politics arise from the very tools selected for in humans by evolution - pattern recognition, language and tool making.  However, when left unchecked by a critical, embodied engagement with the physical world it destroys the human and the collective activity labeled humanity. 

The ultimate end outcome of total politics is non-aware drones extinguishing whatever humanity remains through bodily destruction and disembodied take over of drones droning with other drones - a convergence of high-technology, total belief in binary, eternal truth, and self-perpetuation of prediction and control.

There exists a near endless stream of empirical and logical evidence that establishing the unknowability and uncontrollability of anything but the most simple (non-contingent) objects and systems.  The political profession in its devotion to eternal truth simply ignores this embodied evidence - it must or cede its existence. Whether in America or other countries, nation states the political exercise of humanity is lost in endless droned based violence or mass mediated drone-like human activity.  Even the revolutionary movements in behavior and outcome have become almost indistinguishable from the political systems they revolt against.  It can be no other way if the basic premise of any activity is a rhetorical, disembodied approach. 

It is now a critical moment.  Dronity or Humanity?

(Here's a bone for the exhausted reader... a short summary:  The revolution will be televised, on Youtube on an iPhone watched by a drone.)

Becoming Human

It is unclear how to define humanity or what it means to be a human... exactly.  Humanity lacks definition, as does any living thing, precisely because it is living... contingently, complexly in the real world.  It's undefinability is its existence. 

Learning in an individual living entity is an extension of evolution - the responsive, embodied selection by consequences.  Learning has an existential danger in that its very utility can confuse the learner with false coincidental evidence and shrinking of the perceptive toolkit - learning can literally fold into itself.

The antidote to eternal death is critically embodied living where even the most deeply learned patterns are unlearned by learners as individuals and learners collectively.  This makes for a most certain failure of politics and eternal rhetoric.  The undefinition and unbecoming of humanity into a forever immanently renewed humanity may not win over the transcendence of a frozen in eternal truth dronity. And it may not matter to a quickly evolving dronity. 

(for the dearest of readers who made it to the end: For the few of us humans who'd like to smell the ocean and watch the sunsets and touch the grass, it would be nice if we renewed our embodiment with the world.)

The Long Delay

Human history has a long arc, but a relatively short tipping point towards the illusion of control.  We were for nearly unimaginable expanses of time and space a barely connected species roaming the earth, leaving slight traces in earthy pigment of hands, animals and dreams upon the rocks of our paths and the cave walls of our temporary dwellings.  We were not dominant, mass-farming, tool wielding empires - we were nomads and temporary players in a grand kaleidoscope of Earth.  Our existence was never guaranteed day to day nor over the centuries.

This changed rather rapidly and without some divine intervention - the blind watchmaking of natures evolution accidentally favored homo sapiens.  We happened onto fattened and readily plantable wheat in soil freshly fertile from melting ice ages giving rise to agriculture and related activities.  We relatively quickly took deep advantage of the situation (multiple times independently across the globe).  Agriculture and animal husbandry provided all the obvious advantages for survival like reliable food sources, ability to stay put, deep energy stories, safety and time for knowledge seeking.  The key stroke though was in being able to delay consequences. 

Long Delay entered the human enterprise for the likely the first time.  We were able to delay starvation through reliable, storable harvests.  We were able to build up settlements, trade routes, currency and complicated economic exchange, and, ultimately, we could "plan" for the future.  The idea of A Human Future had deep consequences for our belief systems - that is, our association of what happened in the world and why and how we were part of it.  Without an idea of a future, as realized by reliably imagining one and living to see it realized, there was no sense in having the belief of destiny nor dominion nor property.  A world without delay and of only immediate consequences is one outside of time and outside of storing up - storing up resources, storing up frustrations, storing up weaponry, storing up ideas.    In a nomadic, temporary world - to store is to encumber and to encumber is to be too slow to keep on.

In almost all accounts of big, long history agriculture and its resultant consequences is reverently viewed for all that it enabled.  The great spread of human civilization - its tooling, its trading, its Metal Ages, its science, its culture.  While these are all interesting and complex phenomena, they aren't necessarily good nor are they necessarily bad.  They certainly have produced an incredible proliferation of humanity for many tens of thousands of years.  And they've also come with extreme consequences for humans and non-humanity alike. 

The ability to delay consequences and harbor resources for science and tools and culture also provides those resources for warring, tribalism, weaponry, radicalized ideologies.  Oddly the delayed consequences have a downside that more false beliefs/non-true ideas about how reality works can fester unchecked.  For a Neolithic person a non-true assessment of a situation would likely carry grave consequences.  In the modern world, where most immediate needs for survival are assumed, especially in the West, a person can carry extremely non-true ideas about how reality works and what their place is in the world for decades.  And this is at the root of our current confused and violent situation.

Humans have warmed the planet possibly passed the point of being able to reverse course before there are dire consequences for humans and non-humans.  Humans have killed of an incredible number of species before they knew those species even existed.  Humans cure illness and disease and pests only to unleash unintended stronger adversarial viruses, bacteria and pests.  Humans craft new computational tools and methods with almost no thought to possible downstream uses.  Humans social and civil organization is now dominated by the wealthiest even in its most praised form of Democracy. 

Often all these pessimistic observations are rebuffed with the 100 year old idea of "Creative Destruction."  That is, eventually we end up solving all these things and this is just the natural course of a free market of progress.  It is also constantly remarked that we live in the lowest violence era in human history.  These rebuttals are really just more consequence of Long Delays.  Most of us do not live to see the consequences of these complex contingency chains we set in motion.  We are never put to task for our false predictions, category errors, and misassociation blunders.

Our religions, all the major monotheistic ones, are all about pushing consequences into the "next life."  Our popular moral philosophies typically justify various activities on the rather weak argument about doing it "for our children."  We insure, amortize, capital expense, socially secure, in-debt, mortgage for generations into the future.    All done because we've falsely assumed (or at least not proven to be absolutely true) that somehow, some way it all works out.  We can't even define what that working out would be except within our own delayed, selfish terms - does each of our own families and our own heritage and our own way of life carry on. 

We do not live in a less violent time - we have pushed the violence into the future and out of immediate human physicality.  We've hidden our brutality of this world in our technology and our obsessions with new media.  The most popular video game on the planet is Call of Duty - multiple billions of dollars in revenue.  As our world virtualizes more and more how will we all distinguish the violence in that reality from real violence?  We've ravaged our oceans with pollution and heat and they are rising.  We've fracked the Earth into earthquakes in middle America.  A huge chunk of the Wests GDP goes towards weaponizing - not education and end of life care.  Our sense of identity and place in this world has gone haywire - racism and sexism is still rampant. That terrorism still works is a proof point.  Terror doesn't need thousands of beheadings - just a few and a lot of YouTube views.  Militaries don't need millions of troops in lines razing each other down, just thousands joystick controllers flying drones.  Violence evolved in the resource of delay we provide it.

What repugnant, bizarre thread ensnares almost all of us in these violent delayed consequences?  Shame.  We are all shaming each other for not responding to the same consequences.  The delayed consequences act like a microphone and speaker in the shrieking feedback loop.  The complexity of delayed abuse is doubling back and echoing on top.  We can't cure all suffering, so please cure mine.  We shame each other into more mental abuse of ourselves so that we are incapacitated.  In this shame we trigger the worse natures of ourselves - we lash out in the dark fog of delayed consequences.  We hit anything in front of us we can just to feel something now, feel anything now.  We are ashamed all those future plans and stored up resources didn't real free us as we assumed and passed on.  We are ashamed to be ashamed - so we still treat different skin less worthy unable to admit our shame.

The arc of human history is long but most of it was before we began our short descent into delayed awareness. And here it is.  The only hope. To be here now.  To recognize now, not in the delayed future that isn't yours nor mine, we were wrong.  We will always be wrong.  When we decide we have answers or we decide to store more than what is needed for now - we wrong something else that has just as much right to existence as we do.  Our shameful fight for the righteous, controllable future is what destroys the now for us and the future for others.

Resources for further consideration:

The Ascent of Man, J. Brownoski

The Origin of the Species, Darwin

Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain

Guns, Germs and Steel, J. Diamond

Ishmael, D. Quinn

30,000 Years of Art, Phaidon

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (movie), W. Herzog

Between The World and Me, T. Coates

The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou

The Silence of Animals, J. Gray

Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, BF Skinner

Plato at the Googleplex, R Goldstein

I Am A Strangeloop, D. Hofstader

Better Angels of Our Nature, S Pinker

Making Money, O. Berg

Property is Theft, Proudhon

The Blind Watchmaker

The Selfish Gene, R Dawkins

anything by Martha Nussbam

and about a thousand other resources.  I borrow language and ideas from all of them, perhaps, occasionally adding something new.

To Be Or Not To Be

Timeless reality marches on carelessly smearing existence upon itself.  Humans have been at war with nature and themselves for at least as long as there were enough humans to consider their own survival.  Transcendence hasn't come and won't come without a total absolution of what humans have come to define as humanity - the very notion of humans is one of dominance, manifest destiny, borders, dominion, mastery - ultimately to be Human is to actively Stake Claim Over Existence.

The cruel, thoughtless stroke of evolution was accidentally mutating a species with a biological advantage suited to terraforming. Humanity is a species who long ago deluded itself into believing its selfish survival depends on its ability to transform the world, not be transformed by it.  The selfish gene, in total success, morphs into the selfish species - a species that seeks its own survival at all costs.  So repugnant the thought, it is never uttered in even non-polite company -  that is... the Species As It Is Today Is Perhaps Not Perfect To Rule The Planet and All Planets.  Humanity always builds the metaphorical ark and loads the existence it collectively believes is correct.  And in this ark humanity remains largely unchanged, rarely aware, attempting to stack the deck in its short range physical favor - to defeat nature by being above it.  And to what purpose?  what end?  other than, that's how it must be.

To be, or not to be!  That really is the question.  The selfish species has almost always chosen Not To Be.  Humanity chooses Not To Be in concert with the nature and the purposeless, yet soulful tapestry of existence.  It chooses Not To Be a medium of existence and chooses To Be a raging deity building up its own existence at the destruction existence.  Humanity Stakes Claim by unstaking everything else.

Blasphemy!  Nihilism!  Those are the thoughts of many who will read this.  Hater of life!  Hater of existence!  Which, of course, is completely the anti-thesis of a position of restraint, of an observant and meditative non-position.  A meditative position is one of perpetual openness and one of non-believing, non-truth, non-brand, non-ideology, non-decisions, non-human.  "Non" is the scary part to humans, particularly those humans raised in a Western and/or a religious doctrine of any kind.  The entire idea of civilization, personhood, society, intelligence, religion is a reification of Humanity as a fundamental thing of the universe.  This is the biggest, most fateful delusion of all.

It's near impossible to break free from Humanity As The Source of Existence.  Probably so improbable this break in absolute doctrine humanity will accidentally but totally complete its program - humanity has already crafted the necessary tools of the ultimate Terraform: distributed ledgers, virtual reality and generative manufacturing.  Humanity as a physical species is now completely unnecessary, so total its staking claim over reality.  And then there's this other staking claim out there... one in which the physics still matter to some, but it's no less completely destructive.  This claim is the one of distributed, ancient physical violence married to 24/7 mediation through global hyperconnectivity.  These are the two mainstream humanities.  They are weirdly at odds and yet totally syncopated: in a strangely grotesque Not To Be dance they both are dancing humanity to its final end - the complete distraction of claim staking species that's staked so many claims its oceans will overwhelm all.  As part of that distraction there are those humans of all humanity staking out Human Technology Will Save Us Yet Again.  To Mars!  The Sharing Economy unto the autonomous everything!  Drones To Deliver The Food and The Bombs!

A dark, dim view?  Yes, of the two dominant humanities.  Getting beyond the ultimately limiting humanism and into non-humanism lightness of being can be found.  Existence itself, all around humans and nature alike, is beautiful, wonderful, awesome, unflinching and distinctly Non-Human.  A higher engagement in existence through transformation and transduction - living through existence, not in-spite of it.  To become, to always be-coming into new relations - never clinging to old relations, old terraformed hierarchies.  Relenting and restraining from being the cause and instead becoming affected. 

It is an unlikely future for the human species.  the dominant humanities program Not To Be.

some of us will non-program To Be. Always something else - part of a shifting tapestry of existence.

am I OK? a remark on authenticity.

am I OK?

This is the question I get asked the most nowadays.   Certainly when posts online stop being predominantly jokes about the NFL or filtered photos of babies doing funny stuff and start being drippy, gloopy bullshit painted rectangles with captions like “exist. I. do. not.” the question sort of begs itself.   That and the bizarro, yet totally cliche, year that from age 38 to 39 turned out to be… a seemingly constant drip of great news followed by shit news… you tend to reshape your expression a bit.

This is a #selfie of #you

But that’s really not what the question is about, right?

The question “am I OK?” is about authenticity and freedom and sincerity or rather the lack thereof.  Our hyperconnected world and our American society’s obsession with brand awareness led to this confused and in-authentic mediation between people (and machines.)   Listing all the causes of the mass delusion of what I’ll call the brand of My of Endless Happiness (M.E.H.: the American Dream!) is a waste of energy (as mathematicians do listing trivial causes is left as an exercise to the reader.)    

MEH has us all engaged in small talk, trivia and endless duckfaced happy posts from all the fun things we’re doing instead of communicating.  MEH has us all outraged at the outrages we all share (death and taxes from Presidents!) - those things that are mostly removed from us and outside our direct control - instead of VOTING.  MEH has us big box shopping on Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays and whining about credit card bills in January instead of MAKING THINGS FOR EACH OTHER.   MEH has us reading Fifty Shades rather than, well, GETTING IT ON.

and so on without so-ing on!

No, I’m not OK!  OK is MEH.  OK is eating Bennigan's left overs watching Game of Thrones binging while playing Angry Birds (that’s a madlib, insert your own CHAIN RESTAURANT, POPULAR TV, FAVORITE PHONE APP).    

OK is watching GOP circus debates and ranting online while passing up the last 6 local election cycles because INSERT EXCUSE.   

OK is ok, it’s normal.   It’s buzzed but not drunk nor sober.  It’s brohugs and not embraces or yoddles/chants.   It’s regrams of misquoted inspiration not climbing that mountain 5 miles from your house.   It’s watching TV not playing jazz with friends.   It’s OK not GREAT!  AMAZING!   FUCKING PISSED!   BUMMED!   DEVASTATED!   ENGAGED!   

And it’s ok.   It’s perfectly ok to want OK.   It’s OK to be ok.  Sometimes, ok is exactly where to be.  Sometimes it’s 100x better than not-OK.   

Am I OK?   Maybe.  Sometimes.  here and there.   

Above all, I’m trying to engage.  That’s it.  Chasing experience.  Being a Maker and Doer rather than an mostly an observer and critic.   

Am I sad?   sometimes.  People die.  People get sick.  People hurt.  Animals hurt.  The world and life is hard.   

Am I desperate?  always.  Desperate to exist.  Desperate to renew my own agency.

Am I depressed?  sometimes.   Self diagnosis is generally a bad idea, but I can tell you, yes, I have been and do get depressed and darkness descends.   And the times when it does… as far as I can tell it’s because I’m sitting there OK.  and letting life happen to me.

Am I drunk?  sometimes.   sometimes more than others!   probably more than I should be in quantity and quality.

Am I happy? not that often, but at least once a week.   There’s two kinds of happiness, generally, to me.  True joy… usually that’s experiencing something awesome with others.  and then the little happiness… an espresso on Sunday mornings reading the NYTimes Book Review. (though that might actually be True Joy!).

Am I having fun? YES!   Fun isn’t tickling and playing tag, though that is fun to do.  FUN! is trying To Become Something, fun is Trying To Become A Person.  Fun is being so bad at something you have to do it every single day unending to see even a shred of better than truly terrible at that something.   

Am I Trying to be An Artist?  No.   Such a limited label, IMHO.   I hate labels.

Am I Trying to be a Philosopher?  Yes!   But only for a limited time.  Philosophers like Politicians make poor career titles… the idea of making a career (bring home the bacon) out of something that literally should be blowing up careers seems like a recipe for MEH.

Am I Trying to have a Career in Anything?   No.  I have tattoos on my hands (the things i use to DO STUFF) to remind myself of Information Destiny.  Everything is Information.    I am trying to Inform My Being. Always.

Am I Authentic?   No.   I’m trying.  Each day I’m trying more and more to authentically engage myself and the world.  

Am I Free?  No.   None of us can ever be free of contingencies.  I think Authenticity and Freedom go together.   And they are a process, not an end point.

Do I Want My Endless Happiness?  No, absolutely not under any terms do I want MEH.   I do not seek happiness at the expense of authenticity/freedom.   Life is life (ugh, tautologies…)   life is struggle and competition and birth and death and growth and shrinkage and change and stasis and highs and lows.   It’s hurt and joy.   It’s fast food and gourmet.  Literally life exists on the border - the jagged blurry line - of order and chaos.

So to answer your question, no I’m not ok.  Are you?

This Misconception of Validation

Validation is the concept almost all Western ideas and cultures (politics, companies, social structures!) are based on.   Validation, in terms of people, is in some sense the idea "you are approved to profess what you profess."

It's a social concept and it's horribly incomplete.  Validation is a mostly built up on the idea of "you went through what I went through" which is not the same as what you do/say/build is truth/right/worthwhile.

The idea is the idea.  The thing is the thing.  The theory is right or not.  The math works or it doesn't.

the idea is right.  it's true.  truth is true.  what is true is true.

OR

you're right because you are YOU! you are the person we know is right because you've been right before!  you're RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT because you're the person IN CHARGE.

so which is it? are you about the source? the build up of authority or about the rightness of the idea.

it's Plato vs. the world.  

I think Plato was right.