Herein is the latest installation of my series about learning lessons from various media. If you're playing the home game, drink if you agree. This is a sequel to my previous posts on this topic - Part 1 and Part 2.
Wreck-It Ralph taught me that I need to stay in my lane. Don't try and be better or anything other than what you are - the moment you try, you've fucked it. ...that's a double-edged sword.
Say Anything taught me that music can convey just about anything better than regular old words can. Especially when delivered personally. Via nineties-era boom-box.
Dog Day Afternoon taught me that love can drive people to extraordinary lengths. And body counts.
Gremlins taught me that stairlifts are very, very dangerous.
Civilization V taught me that as long as you are charismatic enough, anyone will help you, unless you CURSE YOU GHANDIIIIIIII
Die Hard taught me a great way to deal with jet alg and various other minor discomforts and maladies. Seriously, try the grabbing-the-floor thing. It genuinely works.
Inception taught me that I should ignore all of those ridiculous motivational posters telling me to Follow Your Dreams.
Pokemon: The First Movie taught me that all it takes for people to realise that conflict is wrong is to notice the effect it has on two people.
Gone In Sixty Seconds taught me that there is literally no car on earth sexier than a 1967 Mustang with a V8 engine.
The Great Dictator taught me that it's not the people that talk a lot that really deserve listening to - it's the ones that talk so rarely that you know they have something to say.
The Star Wars Prequels taught me that you should just watch the original trilogy. Also that it's far more okay to murder Sand People babies than non-Sand People kids.
Mad Max: Fury Road taught me who killed the world. It also taught me that being witnessed can be very important.
Terminator 2 taught me that even carrying a minigun won't make a white man seem as threatening as an unarmed black man to the authorities.
Pixels taught me to never trust Adam Sandler, and also to just watch Wreck-It Ralph again.
Yet again...more will follow in the future.
Saturday, 28 November 2015
Tuesday, 24 November 2015
Solutions
This blog directly relates to the last one.
Having thought about it, I think there is definitely a solution to the terrorist problem. Also to a lot of other problems. This is where it gets a little...esoteric.
The reason why the solution won't be applied isn't due to over-complication. It's the opposite. The solutions are too simple. They're also somewhat counter to human nature, which is not to be confused with humanity.
(If you need a definition as to why they're different: humanity the hand that helps you up, where human nature is the other hand that goes through your wallet at the same time.)
My solution is three steps, and step one is a constant one for me:
REDUCE POVERTY.
Poverty causes, and is a catalyst for, so many other issues that it is impossible to argue that a global reduction of poverty (even a small one) would be a bad thing. It isn't just about having money, or even the things that money can buy you. It's about security.
I'm not saying that the current Capitalist world-model is a good one, and it certainly isn't the best one. My problems with that would fill a couple of blogs in and of themselves. Fact of the matter is, though - if agenda continues to be set by those with plenty of money, and the infrastructure of society is fueled by such money, then people having more of it increases equality in a very lateral fashion.
Extremism breeds in environments of stress and tension. Intolerance thrives in such environments, though it is far easier to spread to more comfortable locales. If the environments that people live in are made better, if lives are improved, then there's less hostility to go around.
You'll notice I am not distinguishing between areas of the world when I talk about this. That's because extremism and intolerance can exist in any country, and feeds the extremism and intolerance of those it antagonises, creating a feedback loop of backlash. "Violence begets violence," Dr Martin Luther King Jr. told us, and he was right.
The second step in our solution is actually aided by the first one:
INCREASE EDUCATION.
While a decrease of poverty should naturally lead to better education as a natural process, a concerted effort to educate people better would be invaluable.
I don't necessarily just mean book learning here. Being able to parrot long words or knowing how to say basketball in Spanish or memorising sulphuric acid's chemical make-up. All these things are good, but knowing is not understanding, and understanding is key.
I was taught a lot of very useful things as I grew up and in my early adult years, but there was a lot more I had to pick up myself, and yet more that I haven't worked out yet. I was taught something about religion, and something about history, and the tiniest amount of economics - but nothing about politics, nothing about mental health, very little about how to be okay with my own company and how to avoid being drawn into the bad crowds I was told constantly to avoid.
It's hard. I know it's hard. The fact is, though - this is 2015. I am sure there must be some way in which we can teach without brutalising, traumatising or dehumanising. There must be.
With a wider base of knowledge and understanding, not only of ourselves but others, then it is far harder for the kind of thinking that allows for terrorism and its associated backlash to take root. Not impossible, but far harder.
Again. I do not distinguish on nationality or locale here. This is universal.
As step two was helped by step one, step three benefits from both:
BE LESS SHITTY TO EACH OTHER.
I've talked about this before. A while ago, but still.
To take a step away from my socially responsible language, we are shitty to each other all the time. We're shitty to each other in a lot of ways - some passive, some active. Some people's shittiness is more effective than others - they have more pull, more to gain, more to lose.
Direct shittiness is thankfully relatively rare, but still exists. Being abusive for whatever reason or over whatever perceived slight. Wishing harm and death on people, and trying to make that happen. This kind of shitty is hard to stop without changing the way people think and feel (see steps one and two), but it can be done.
It is large-scale indirect shittiness, however, that causes the real damage.
Here's some of that indirect shittiness: if a UK arms manufacturer sells something to someone and they default on the repayment, the loss is underwritten by UKEF, a government-funded export credit agency. That means, it comes out of our taxes. Effectively that means that if Gun Company A wants to sell guns to Warlords 1, 2 and 3, they don't have to care about whether or not they will actually get paid. If Warlords 2 and 3 default, then we, you and I, pay to cover their debts.
There was talk about stopping this back in 2012. But then there was talk of stopping this back in 2000 as well, so...
How is this indirect shittiness? Well think about it. Using funds provided you by the taxpayer to allow the arms industry to flog hardware around the world with little worry of being shafted? How many of those sales that have been shored up with our money have put weapons in the hands of the people we happily call terrorists? Literally not caring enough about where the guns end up, as long as we just keep selling them, even to people who can't pay.
That happened in a different market, recently. It happened with houses. In the US. In 2007. It caused the financial crisis that we are currently existing in right now. The crisis that makes it all the more bitter that what little money we have is still being used to hedge the bets of munitions firms.
More indirect shittiness: most policy decisions we have made to do with the Middle East. Starting from year zero. Hell, imperialism as a whole and the superiority complex we have as a result has done us literally NO favours, ever. Some of that I would argue is direct shittiness, but the attitude we have now is formed on centuries of action that we had little to do with but still carry with us. Again it is the powers that be that dabble with this shittiness, drawing the lines of demarcation in Palestine, handing out support here, handing down financial punishments there. Governments use other countries like sandboxes, and then wonder why the citizens of those countries get all pissed off.
That may sound like I'm sympathising with terrorists. Understand this: I hate what they did, but that doesn't mean I can't draw a line of causality from why. Do I agree with them? No. Do I agree with what our governments have done? No. They're not mutually exclusive.
Yet more indirect shittiness can be found in the media. It sells papers to be extreme, to have eye-catching headlines, to appeal to the controversial in society. Fanning the flames of intimidation and tension leads to viewers which leads to more Good Things, and because they don't care about the irresponsibility of their actions and who may suffer as a consequence, they continue to be shitty to other human beings.
That may sound like I'm sympathising with terrorists. Understand this: I hate what they did, but that doesn't mean I can't draw a line of causality from why. Do I agree with them? No. Do I agree with what our governments have done? No. They're not mutually exclusive.
Yet more indirect shittiness can be found in the media. It sells papers to be extreme, to have eye-catching headlines, to appeal to the controversial in society. Fanning the flames of intimidation and tension leads to viewers which leads to more Good Things, and because they don't care about the irresponsibility of their actions and who may suffer as a consequence, they continue to be shitty to other human beings.
And more indirect shittiness...well, that falls at the feet of normal folks like you and I.
See, the things described above - they are huge acts of dismissive callousness. But that callousness has to come from somewhere; and if we allow for small cruelties, large ones soon follow.
Society in general looks like it rewards kindness and compassion. It doesn't. That's the message that is put out, but the reality is that it rewards inversion, huddling down against the cold alone and letting everyone else cope for themselves. As small groups and families and communities we stand together, but any further than that - nothing.
If we cared more, if we reached out more, then there'd be less anger and hatred and loneliness and fear in this world. All of the soil that extremism grows in - here and abroad - would be lessened. Lessen the soil, lessen the crop; and the returns would only increase.
The thing of it is...it all sounds so wishy-washy and hard to achieve because...well...we all know people aren't like that. Nobody believes in the things that would reduce poverty, because that means redistribution of wealth, or adjustment of current living conditions. No one wants that. Fuck those worse off than me, I don't want to be worse off. Refugees? Charity starts at home. Charity? I've got enough to worry about.
It's an austerity mindset, an enclosed and fearful mindset. It is people unwilling to help the whole because the one is more important. It's a mindset that we are born into, live in, die in. As I said earlier, it is what society wants of us.
In the end, we have made a very uncomfortable bed. We've done a lot in the past that is coming back to bite us in the present and will continue to bite us in the future; and the only way out of it is to stop making the same stupid mistakes we keep making, fix the holes in the cieling we keep ignoring, and actually do something for our fellow people.
The crying shame is that the only time the sympathy comes out is when people die. That's what it takes: the corpses of innocents.
There's our solutions. There they are. Simple concepts, achievable concepts, if only people would DO THEM.
But they won't.
Not until it's far too late.
The thing of it is...it all sounds so wishy-washy and hard to achieve because...well...we all know people aren't like that. Nobody believes in the things that would reduce poverty, because that means redistribution of wealth, or adjustment of current living conditions. No one wants that. Fuck those worse off than me, I don't want to be worse off. Refugees? Charity starts at home. Charity? I've got enough to worry about.
It's an austerity mindset, an enclosed and fearful mindset. It is people unwilling to help the whole because the one is more important. It's a mindset that we are born into, live in, die in. As I said earlier, it is what society wants of us.
In the end, we have made a very uncomfortable bed. We've done a lot in the past that is coming back to bite us in the present and will continue to bite us in the future; and the only way out of it is to stop making the same stupid mistakes we keep making, fix the holes in the cieling we keep ignoring, and actually do something for our fellow people.
The crying shame is that the only time the sympathy comes out is when people die. That's what it takes: the corpses of innocents.
There's our solutions. There they are. Simple concepts, achievable concepts, if only people would DO THEM.
But they won't.
Not until it's far too late.
Saturday, 14 November 2015
The Question Is Why
A lot of bad shit has happened to the world in the past week.
A lot of innocent people have been killed, their only crime - being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those places have been reasonably diverse. One occupies the majority of the media attention, of course, because...hell, in the Lebanon, people get blown up and shot all the time. It's monstrous and cruel and so very regular that nobody bats an eyelid. Like acceptance by mass numeral.
It is as tragic as it always is to see innocent people die. It's never right, for whatever reason. It's an awful injustice and it just shouldn't ever happen...but it does.
What really bothers me...what truly works my nerves...is not knowing why.
Why would these people choose to do what they do? Everyone has a theory. Some of those theories are perhaps based more on personal bias than actual fact. What chain of causality led to those people pulling the triggers, flicking the switches? What decision-making process took them from step 1 to the awful final step?
What caused those decisions to be made the way they were? Not "because X said so" or "because they were angry", but what led to that? What caused all of this to happen? If these acts of atrocity are the symptoms of a sickness, what is the sickness itself?
I only phrase it like that, because it's all too easy to treat the symptom, not the sickness. A comparable situation - in theory, if not in actual tragedy - is the spread of Malaria. To constantly try and patch the holes, to rush around curing each outbreak and instance - that is burning a lot of energy hacking at branches, when the roots of the problem remain out of reach. To stop the mosquitoes that spread the Malaria, to find a way to prevent them from spreading it, to get people out of areas where it spreads from...that's a cure.
I wish I knew why. I dearly wish I knew why. That way I could make sense of it and see a solution.
I can't. That is what keeps me up at night.
I suspect that there's many theoretical root-causes. Societal reasons on the macro-scale, which can be tackled with big, difficult decisions, the kind that make people say "yeah but that wouldn't work really would it" not because they won't work but because making people believe it will work is harder than just letting it all keep happening.
I just don't know.
I wish I did.
A lot of innocent people have been killed, their only crime - being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those places have been reasonably diverse. One occupies the majority of the media attention, of course, because...hell, in the Lebanon, people get blown up and shot all the time. It's monstrous and cruel and so very regular that nobody bats an eyelid. Like acceptance by mass numeral.
It is as tragic as it always is to see innocent people die. It's never right, for whatever reason. It's an awful injustice and it just shouldn't ever happen...but it does.
What really bothers me...what truly works my nerves...is not knowing why.
Why would these people choose to do what they do? Everyone has a theory. Some of those theories are perhaps based more on personal bias than actual fact. What chain of causality led to those people pulling the triggers, flicking the switches? What decision-making process took them from step 1 to the awful final step?
What caused those decisions to be made the way they were? Not "because X said so" or "because they were angry", but what led to that? What caused all of this to happen? If these acts of atrocity are the symptoms of a sickness, what is the sickness itself?
I only phrase it like that, because it's all too easy to treat the symptom, not the sickness. A comparable situation - in theory, if not in actual tragedy - is the spread of Malaria. To constantly try and patch the holes, to rush around curing each outbreak and instance - that is burning a lot of energy hacking at branches, when the roots of the problem remain out of reach. To stop the mosquitoes that spread the Malaria, to find a way to prevent them from spreading it, to get people out of areas where it spreads from...that's a cure.
I wish I knew why. I dearly wish I knew why. That way I could make sense of it and see a solution.
I can't. That is what keeps me up at night.
I suspect that there's many theoretical root-causes. Societal reasons on the macro-scale, which can be tackled with big, difficult decisions, the kind that make people say "yeah but that wouldn't work really would it" not because they won't work but because making people believe it will work is harder than just letting it all keep happening.
I just don't know.
I wish I did.
Sunday, 8 November 2015
I Love This City
I absolutely adore this place.
What is it about Brighton & Hove that draws me back? I find it hard to pin down but the draw is there all the same. Rain or shine, hot or cold. It's like this place is a second home to me.
Let us start with the obvious: it isn't home. Being somewhere else is necessary every now and then. It brings perspective, refreshes the bits of us that stifle and chafe when trapped in the same-old.
Related to that - the convenience of a city. Public transport, reasonably cheap, and well-managed too. 4G all over. All the big chains that one could ask for, within easy distance...
...and at the same time - a massive swathe of small shops. Specialist places, little pubs, music venues and eating spots. Stuff that would usually require a small town. All these things thrive and flourish
Culture and art. There's a big music scene, bigger than the surface are seems to allow for. There's galleries and art all over the place. Graf - down half of the streets you will find paint on walls. A lot of it good stuff, too. Those big green phone exchange boxes - half of those are decorated. It's refreshing to see. Like the city has tattoos.
The local populace. They are interesting people - some visibly, some below the surface. Walk down the street or sit outside a cafe and just watch. There's more life there than one would ever expect.
It just...feels good, to be here, in this place. If I ever get my shit together to the point that I can move off the Island, this is my #1 consideration. It's my kind of city.
I wonder how long it would take for the honeymoon to end.
Thursday, 29 October 2015
The Way You Look Tonight
So on Tuesday a friend-and-work-colleague and I were talking about formal and professional dress.
One thing about where I work is that most of us folk that do the guts of the work can wear pretty much what we want. I mean as long as it isn't stoopid. If I turned up with nine-inch platforms and a four-foot mohawk then some questions may be asked, but probably from a safety perspective rather than a fashion one.
The thing is, we're there to work on computers for eight and a half hours a day. Very vew of us speak to clients, or even see them. We aren't sales or account management - and the folks who ARE tend to dress in a sufficiently impressive fashion when necessary.
It got me to thinking, as we were talking about it.
I don't often comment on how people look or how they dress, especially uninvited. When asked I try and be honest, but I have to open with the fact that I'm not a fashion expert, I'm not an aesthete, and I don't know how a lot of the unwritten rules work
There's a few reasons for this. One of the main ones is that it's none of my business.
There's very few circumstances in which how someone dresses is my business. On 99% of days, 100% of people shouldn't have to care what I think of what they're wearing. They shouldn't have to dress for me, and honestly, I'd rather people wore what made them happy and comfortable than anything else. It's like I feel that maybe, passing comment is me tacitly implying that they've fulfilled (or failed to fulfill) my expectations, expectations that they were duty-bound to consider for some ridiculous reason.
I don't understand the entire business-formal thing. I don't get it, and wearing shirts and ties makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable. Like, I know that it is how people are expected to dress, it is what you are meant to do, but...why? ...like why is that the uniform? And why would people who do, say, what I do be expected to wear button-down shirts and nice ties? Is it a mindset thing? Like school uniform? Will it make me type better? ...I just...don't understand.
Sure, a suit makes anyone look great if it is cut right - but I'm not at work to look good. I'm at work to quality control. I have work duties and none of those work duties involve being a stylish thirty-something.
I recently posted on Twitter a realisation that I came to; I am, essentially, always going to be a background character from Daria. In how I dress, how I act, how I live - it is pretty much who I am. I'm also very much okay with that, in all honesty. I like wearing faded metal band shirts and jeans and sneaks. What does that say about me? Probably that I'm not very corporate-minded. Maybe a point in my life will come where I decide to wear polo necks and slacks for the rest of my days - but I doubt it.
There's probably something wrong with that, but I can't outline it, and will probably act with a degree of incredulity if actually told the reason. Even if it makes sense. Is that meant to happen before or after the mid-life crisis? Am I IN my mid-life crisis? If I had the money would I be buying a Ferrari?
Maybe I just skipped every normal stage of my life between early teens and early forties. Maybe I'm still trying to be a teenager, except with sticking to responsibilities and having reasonable life expectations.
All I know is that if you look good, I will probably keep it to myself - unless I think you REALLY need to know.
One thing about where I work is that most of us folk that do the guts of the work can wear pretty much what we want. I mean as long as it isn't stoopid. If I turned up with nine-inch platforms and a four-foot mohawk then some questions may be asked, but probably from a safety perspective rather than a fashion one.
The thing is, we're there to work on computers for eight and a half hours a day. Very vew of us speak to clients, or even see them. We aren't sales or account management - and the folks who ARE tend to dress in a sufficiently impressive fashion when necessary.
It got me to thinking, as we were talking about it.
I don't often comment on how people look or how they dress, especially uninvited. When asked I try and be honest, but I have to open with the fact that I'm not a fashion expert, I'm not an aesthete, and I don't know how a lot of the unwritten rules work
There's a few reasons for this. One of the main ones is that it's none of my business.
There's very few circumstances in which how someone dresses is my business. On 99% of days, 100% of people shouldn't have to care what I think of what they're wearing. They shouldn't have to dress for me, and honestly, I'd rather people wore what made them happy and comfortable than anything else. It's like I feel that maybe, passing comment is me tacitly implying that they've fulfilled (or failed to fulfill) my expectations, expectations that they were duty-bound to consider for some ridiculous reason.
I don't understand the entire business-formal thing. I don't get it, and wearing shirts and ties makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable. Like, I know that it is how people are expected to dress, it is what you are meant to do, but...why? ...like why is that the uniform? And why would people who do, say, what I do be expected to wear button-down shirts and nice ties? Is it a mindset thing? Like school uniform? Will it make me type better? ...I just...don't understand.
Sure, a suit makes anyone look great if it is cut right - but I'm not at work to look good. I'm at work to quality control. I have work duties and none of those work duties involve being a stylish thirty-something.
I recently posted on Twitter a realisation that I came to; I am, essentially, always going to be a background character from Daria. In how I dress, how I act, how I live - it is pretty much who I am. I'm also very much okay with that, in all honesty. I like wearing faded metal band shirts and jeans and sneaks. What does that say about me? Probably that I'm not very corporate-minded. Maybe a point in my life will come where I decide to wear polo necks and slacks for the rest of my days - but I doubt it.
There's probably something wrong with that, but I can't outline it, and will probably act with a degree of incredulity if actually told the reason. Even if it makes sense. Is that meant to happen before or after the mid-life crisis? Am I IN my mid-life crisis? If I had the money would I be buying a Ferrari?
Maybe I just skipped every normal stage of my life between early teens and early forties. Maybe I'm still trying to be a teenager, except with sticking to responsibilities and having reasonable life expectations.
All I know is that if you look good, I will probably keep it to myself - unless I think you REALLY need to know.
Saturday, 24 October 2015
It Is By Will Alone (On Insecurity pt4)
This is the forth, and final, part of a series of blog posts on insecurity. Each one has had a different theme.
I read a fair amount of Nietzsche.
...no, wait, come back!
Okay okay. I HAVE read a fair amount of Nietzsche, and that's led me to some interesting thoughts about us as a people and how we do things.
So I agree with his thinking in terms of the "will to power" - the constant drive to succeed, achieve, and control one's environment. To put one's self in a position of power if at all possible. That's basic human behavior. You can see it as greed, but that's a gross oversimplification.
I think the reason why we want this, at a very base level - driven instinctively by that urge to control and command - is because we're insecure.
Yep, I've been banging on about it for the past three weeks - it is time to draw a conclusion.
We, at our core, are insecure. It is part of being sentient, of having an ego, of having consciousness. Our fear of failure is tied to our drive for success. When what you want is so deeply ingrained in you that it governs you, then surely the urge to have it is paralleled by an equal and opposite fear of NOT having it.
Doesn't that make a degree of sense? The urge to survive as a constant leads us to make that survival a stable thing, a given thing rather than a continuous struggle. We want that safety net, that security - we're afraid of the alternative, because the alternative is not surviving at all. We're afraid of it, avoid it in the same way as we instinctively avoid fire, dangerous situations and awful things.
Now a great many people will probably claim that this really doesn't apply to them. "But John," you will cry, hauling yourself out of the plastic bathtub filled with Tesco own brand whipped cream. "I'm not afraid, or insecure! Everything you have said is just an attempt to validate your own anxiety!"
Perhaps, but I also call bullshit.
There is a disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease; it is a genetic disorder, and it damages two small almond-sized bits of your brain - and when that happens, you can't feel fear any more. Unless that happens, boy howdy, you feel fear. It's what you do with it, that counts.
We've all heard the saying - feel the fear and do it anyway. It's true. There's no bravery without fear. Everyone feels it and it is something that we need to admit to and acknowledge - ignoring our weaknesses and our flaws is a really good way to lose a hundred battles. (That's a Sun Tzu joke.)
We seek to make our lives better, to make our lives more secure, because we fear that lack of security. It's what we do, what we spend most of our time doing. We need to take control of our environment because we're afraid of what would happen if it controlled us.
Some of the worst situations people can be in involve loss of control and loss of agency. The most stressful situations are those out of our control, where we have to watch the disaster happen right in front of us. Knowing you can't change it. That is the real nightmare. Life taken out of one's hands, and placed at the whim of causality.
As long as we have power - as long as we have control over our lives - we can minimise our exposure to the things we are insecure about. We can reduce contact with toxic individuals, lower the chance of mishaps, ensure that our day-to-day lives pass by with as little fear as possible. In the modern world that often comes down to money; the power-money dynamic is well-documented in this day and age. The two are often conflated.
Hate the awkwardness of public transport? You won't ever have to worry about it if you get a car. Nervous about going to the gym because you don't like how your body looks (but want to go to the gym anyway because you don't like how your body looks)? Buy your own gym equipment, or find a gym with such open hours that you can go when no-one else is there.
This is the urge Nietzsche speaks of. To achieve and excel, and thus secure one's existence. Outrun your demons by feeding your angels. I've spoken before about how one's needs in life change as one's income or standing alters, right here. It's true. The end argument is that all we really want is to have agency over our lives - which is not only something we should want and strive for, but something that we should help everyone achieve.
Which is why we're so pissed off that the Tory government wants to get rid of the Human Rights Act, and if you're not pissed off, then you haven't been paying attention...but I digress.
Insecurity, then. It's the devil we run from, the constant whip against our backs. Sometimes we control it, negate it, nullify and minimise it - and sometimes it guides us. Sometimes it's a little of both. Sometimes it is one but we think it is the other.
It is the root of a great many evils. It leads to racism and greed and who knows what else. I could probably draw a line of causality between most crimes that occur on a daily basis, and a base insecurity that led to it happening.
It haunts us, this fear, this gnawing anxiety. It hides itself in other drives and motives. It poisons otherwise noble intentions, adds inflection to sentences and stills voices that would otherwise speak out.
It costs lives.
Insecurity. The burden of sentience, of creativity, of imagination.
If it were a dragon, we'd be well-served to slay it.
I read a fair amount of Nietzsche.
...no, wait, come back!
Okay okay. I HAVE read a fair amount of Nietzsche, and that's led me to some interesting thoughts about us as a people and how we do things.
So I agree with his thinking in terms of the "will to power" - the constant drive to succeed, achieve, and control one's environment. To put one's self in a position of power if at all possible. That's basic human behavior. You can see it as greed, but that's a gross oversimplification.
I think the reason why we want this, at a very base level - driven instinctively by that urge to control and command - is because we're insecure.
Yep, I've been banging on about it for the past three weeks - it is time to draw a conclusion.
We, at our core, are insecure. It is part of being sentient, of having an ego, of having consciousness. Our fear of failure is tied to our drive for success. When what you want is so deeply ingrained in you that it governs you, then surely the urge to have it is paralleled by an equal and opposite fear of NOT having it.
Doesn't that make a degree of sense? The urge to survive as a constant leads us to make that survival a stable thing, a given thing rather than a continuous struggle. We want that safety net, that security - we're afraid of the alternative, because the alternative is not surviving at all. We're afraid of it, avoid it in the same way as we instinctively avoid fire, dangerous situations and awful things.
Now a great many people will probably claim that this really doesn't apply to them. "But John," you will cry, hauling yourself out of the plastic bathtub filled with Tesco own brand whipped cream. "I'm not afraid, or insecure! Everything you have said is just an attempt to validate your own anxiety!"
Perhaps, but I also call bullshit.
There is a disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease; it is a genetic disorder, and it damages two small almond-sized bits of your brain - and when that happens, you can't feel fear any more. Unless that happens, boy howdy, you feel fear. It's what you do with it, that counts.
We've all heard the saying - feel the fear and do it anyway. It's true. There's no bravery without fear. Everyone feels it and it is something that we need to admit to and acknowledge - ignoring our weaknesses and our flaws is a really good way to lose a hundred battles. (That's a Sun Tzu joke.)
We seek to make our lives better, to make our lives more secure, because we fear that lack of security. It's what we do, what we spend most of our time doing. We need to take control of our environment because we're afraid of what would happen if it controlled us.
Some of the worst situations people can be in involve loss of control and loss of agency. The most stressful situations are those out of our control, where we have to watch the disaster happen right in front of us. Knowing you can't change it. That is the real nightmare. Life taken out of one's hands, and placed at the whim of causality.
As long as we have power - as long as we have control over our lives - we can minimise our exposure to the things we are insecure about. We can reduce contact with toxic individuals, lower the chance of mishaps, ensure that our day-to-day lives pass by with as little fear as possible. In the modern world that often comes down to money; the power-money dynamic is well-documented in this day and age. The two are often conflated.
Hate the awkwardness of public transport? You won't ever have to worry about it if you get a car. Nervous about going to the gym because you don't like how your body looks (but want to go to the gym anyway because you don't like how your body looks)? Buy your own gym equipment, or find a gym with such open hours that you can go when no-one else is there.
This is the urge Nietzsche speaks of. To achieve and excel, and thus secure one's existence. Outrun your demons by feeding your angels. I've spoken before about how one's needs in life change as one's income or standing alters, right here. It's true. The end argument is that all we really want is to have agency over our lives - which is not only something we should want and strive for, but something that we should help everyone achieve.
Which is why we're so pissed off that the Tory government wants to get rid of the Human Rights Act, and if you're not pissed off, then you haven't been paying attention...but I digress.
Insecurity, then. It's the devil we run from, the constant whip against our backs. Sometimes we control it, negate it, nullify and minimise it - and sometimes it guides us. Sometimes it's a little of both. Sometimes it is one but we think it is the other.
It is the root of a great many evils. It leads to racism and greed and who knows what else. I could probably draw a line of causality between most crimes that occur on a daily basis, and a base insecurity that led to it happening.
It haunts us, this fear, this gnawing anxiety. It hides itself in other drives and motives. It poisons otherwise noble intentions, adds inflection to sentences and stills voices that would otherwise speak out.
It costs lives.
Insecurity. The burden of sentience, of creativity, of imagination.
If it were a dragon, we'd be well-served to slay it.
Saturday, 17 October 2015
Learned Behavior (On Insecurity pt3)
This is the third part of a series of blog posts on insecurity. Each one will have a different theme.
As anyone who is anyone will be able to tell you - in Bowling For Soup's opinion, High School Never Ends.
How right are they?
I'm sure everyone I know either believes, or has been told, that school is the best days of one's life. Certain parts of it are awesome, sure - not paying bills is a wonderful thing, or worrying about work. Certainly things were easier on that side of the scale.
Mentally though? Emotionally, spiritually? Well, I suppose I can only speak for myself - but high school was never an environment in which I did remarkably well. The actual learning, the academics, that was just fine. People skills, though? Not being basically completely mental? Yeah, that fell down on me pretty hard.
I was in high school between 13 and 18. That school now deals with kids that are 11-18. This period in someone's life is...well...let's just say chemically difficult. You are pretty much at the mercy of a lot of hormones, a lot of brain chemistry, and a lot of alterations in one's physiology. That in itself is a difficult environment to exist in.
Then we add the tribal mentality that seems to exist. There's us and them - lots of different thems, sometimes a couple of different uses. It's our first taste of semi-adult sociology, and we come into this environment loaded with brains like chemical bombs.
The culture of school, of education, of being the age one is and doing the things one does at that age - it becomes something of a power struggle. Everyone has authority over a schoolkid. The teachers, other parents, other adults; and at a time when self-doubt is enforced upon you by simple virtue of hormonal shift, that lack of control and agency can lead to some pretty harmful mental states. One grasps for power and control wherever they can. Sure, that teacher there has the authority to make you do things and you have to listen - so obviously, if you find a way to "get one over" on that teacher, to express some form of dominance or control, then...well, you're hard pressed not to take it.
That goes double for other kids - because if you push a teacher, or try and bully an adult, there are repercussions. Try it with your peers, though? You will almost certainly get away with it. As evidenced by the fact that bullying is still pretty much widespread to endemic proportions even today, in this enlightened age.
It's a truism oft repeated by the victims of bullying that those doing it only do it because they're insecure. That's probably right. They feel like they aren't in control of their environment, so they strive to take control over part of it - their victim. Power is a stimulant. Once you've had a little of it, you want more, and sometimes you want it more than you want to be a good person.
We've all heard that school is the best years of our lives - have we not also all heard that kids are cruel? Or witnessed that cruelty? They can be assholes - to each other even more so than outsiders. Trust me, I was one, and even though I spend most of my time keeping my head down and avoiding being targeted, I did my fair shair of asshole things.
The thing is, I look at some of the behaviour people demonstrate long after high school, and a lot of it hasn't actually changed that much.
Why would it, in fairness? Sure, we grow up - our tastes change - we pick up responsibilities and learn how to cope with them, we learn hard lessons and have life experiences both good and bad. Our mentality has already been shaped, though; and unshaping it is hard work, sometimes harder than people are willing to work toward.
Xenophobia is a high school behaviour, which develops even earlier than that - as social structures get formed they decide that some things are okay and some things aren't, and anything different or weird is a very obvious target. That can last - that can stick around, especially if unchallenged. Likewise, the power politics of the playground; alphas beating their chests, social climbers belittling others, unspoken rules being set and those who don't follow them being mocked. Now what I've just described could happen anywhere at any age after middle school. Admit it: you've been in places like that, or at least heard of them.
We were all in a state of constant insecurity once. We learned some lessons that hurt a hell of a lot, and we picked up some habits that don't help us very much in adult life. It's hard to break a habit. Trust me, I know.
If only we could recognise it in ourselves and do something constructive about it...maybe we'd all be a little happier.
As anyone who is anyone will be able to tell you - in Bowling For Soup's opinion, High School Never Ends.
How right are they?
I'm sure everyone I know either believes, or has been told, that school is the best days of one's life. Certain parts of it are awesome, sure - not paying bills is a wonderful thing, or worrying about work. Certainly things were easier on that side of the scale.
Mentally though? Emotionally, spiritually? Well, I suppose I can only speak for myself - but high school was never an environment in which I did remarkably well. The actual learning, the academics, that was just fine. People skills, though? Not being basically completely mental? Yeah, that fell down on me pretty hard.
I was in high school between 13 and 18. That school now deals with kids that are 11-18. This period in someone's life is...well...let's just say chemically difficult. You are pretty much at the mercy of a lot of hormones, a lot of brain chemistry, and a lot of alterations in one's physiology. That in itself is a difficult environment to exist in.
Then we add the tribal mentality that seems to exist. There's us and them - lots of different thems, sometimes a couple of different uses. It's our first taste of semi-adult sociology, and we come into this environment loaded with brains like chemical bombs.
The culture of school, of education, of being the age one is and doing the things one does at that age - it becomes something of a power struggle. Everyone has authority over a schoolkid. The teachers, other parents, other adults; and at a time when self-doubt is enforced upon you by simple virtue of hormonal shift, that lack of control and agency can lead to some pretty harmful mental states. One grasps for power and control wherever they can. Sure, that teacher there has the authority to make you do things and you have to listen - so obviously, if you find a way to "get one over" on that teacher, to express some form of dominance or control, then...well, you're hard pressed not to take it.
That goes double for other kids - because if you push a teacher, or try and bully an adult, there are repercussions. Try it with your peers, though? You will almost certainly get away with it. As evidenced by the fact that bullying is still pretty much widespread to endemic proportions even today, in this enlightened age.
It's a truism oft repeated by the victims of bullying that those doing it only do it because they're insecure. That's probably right. They feel like they aren't in control of their environment, so they strive to take control over part of it - their victim. Power is a stimulant. Once you've had a little of it, you want more, and sometimes you want it more than you want to be a good person.
We've all heard that school is the best years of our lives - have we not also all heard that kids are cruel? Or witnessed that cruelty? They can be assholes - to each other even more so than outsiders. Trust me, I was one, and even though I spend most of my time keeping my head down and avoiding being targeted, I did my fair shair of asshole things.
The thing is, I look at some of the behaviour people demonstrate long after high school, and a lot of it hasn't actually changed that much.
Why would it, in fairness? Sure, we grow up - our tastes change - we pick up responsibilities and learn how to cope with them, we learn hard lessons and have life experiences both good and bad. Our mentality has already been shaped, though; and unshaping it is hard work, sometimes harder than people are willing to work toward.
Xenophobia is a high school behaviour, which develops even earlier than that - as social structures get formed they decide that some things are okay and some things aren't, and anything different or weird is a very obvious target. That can last - that can stick around, especially if unchallenged. Likewise, the power politics of the playground; alphas beating their chests, social climbers belittling others, unspoken rules being set and those who don't follow them being mocked. Now what I've just described could happen anywhere at any age after middle school. Admit it: you've been in places like that, or at least heard of them.
We were all in a state of constant insecurity once. We learned some lessons that hurt a hell of a lot, and we picked up some habits that don't help us very much in adult life. It's hard to break a habit. Trust me, I know.
If only we could recognise it in ourselves and do something constructive about it...maybe we'd all be a little happier.
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