See, on March 16 I gave seeker the following suggestion:
[21:58.08] <levity> like i've said, i am more than willing to share my megaphone with you. dude, just do what i do. get a voice recorder and start logging your life. Time stamps and all. start archiving yourself. you dont have to share it like i do if you dont want to, but being able to put your thoughts into a searchable, chronolgical, true format will do wonder
[21:58.08] <levity> s with your memory. I mean, when i first started, sometiomes months would go by before i typed my loggings. I would be left completely flabbersgasted at the accurate memory-refreshes I had. I would think to myself, "I would HAVE NEVER remembered that if I hadn't recorded it."
[21:59.17] <levity> and its not like you'd be copying me, it would be your very own unique thoughts you would be logging
[22:02.20] <levity> but let's just suppose you would take my cues and you eventually evolved into a blog, can you imagine the shared power we could tap into linking our blogs? we wil be total trendsetters and then everyone and their mom's will be following our lead.
[22:03.45] <levity> make it to where you can read yourself, then you can more easily study yourself and find out what areas need improvement, a whole lot easier than my trusting your not-as perfect memory
[22:04.01] <levity> -my +by
[22:05.02] <levity> you've told me you are stressed and don't know what to do.
[22:05.15] <levity> there's a suggestion, just try it
Well, yesterday, the 23rd seeker took my advice! IT'S A GREAT READ! BUCKLE UP!
Seeker's diatribe!
"This is a recording just for me and anybody else who's listening. *laugh* If that gives you any idea of how paranoid I am. I think that it's probably quite reasonable to expect that pretty much all of our digital correspondence is under some kind of surveillance, which I have yet to decide whether that's a good or a bad thing, it merely is what it is. Ideally, if it is necessary, it wouldn't be.
I think a lot about the world and... myself, apparently. I guess, where I fit into it. For the time being, I'm not entirely sure where I fit into it. I know one thing: I volunteer at an animal shelter. Is that all I want to be? I think it really depends on what I'm capable of, and maybe what I'm capable of depends on me. Because the truth is is that I don't know. Maybe I'm just a narcissistic asshole, I have no idea.
Something what I struggle with is never feeling like I have enough information to make a good decision. At least when it comes to the important things. "One of my fundamental assumptions is that the most important resources an organization has is valid information."
- Chris Argyris Apparently, I'm an "idealist", and I have to agree. What I want is basically to strive for an ideal.
I really think that the moment that you decide that something is unachievable is the deciding factor in what makes it unachievable! Once you decide something's not possible, then you've already eliminated that possibility from your mind, so there's no conditions that you could take at that point to actually achieving it.
Like, in a smaller context -- so, I'm thinking about when I was talking with my friend about going kayaking this year, and we made it somewhat close to this one bridge that's like 7 miles up the river or something like that and then back in one day when we were both in pretty good kayaking shape. And we basically decided that we wanted to try and get there this year, and I think that that sounds like a lot of fun.
It seems reasonable, like a reasonable objective. It's like "Hey, you've come close to meeting this goal already, so that means it should be achievable." So that's a small-scale thing, and on a large scale, let's think about world peace. Because the ideal situation in my kayaking story is getting to the bridge, making it back, not dying or having to call for medical evacuation or something crazy. But that's the ideal, is achieving it. So if your ideal is to achieve world peace, you can't if you think that it's not possible.
So, these are -- you know, it's interesting, because these are actually examples of collective decisions. Except in one example, the collective is two people, and in the other one, the collective is really everybody. So then what happens when you get, let's say -- all right, music, quiet down. Let's say that the majority of people in the collective believe that it's -- actually, let's make it even harder, let's believe the minority of people in the collective believe that it's possible to achieve the ideal outcome, and the majority don't. So, if your decision-making structure is just direct democracy and everybody's supposed to be bound to the decision, then okay, we just don't try and achieve world peace. We just deal with what we've got and we don't strive for some lofty ideal.
I don't think that that's representative of the real situation, I think that if given the option, the majority of people probably would prefer to have lasting peace than to be at war all the time.
I imagine that the people that reject it probably reject it out of some kind of very specialized knowledge that illustrates why there's a breakdown in such a system or in such a process. But, in my opinion, if that's not theoretical, if it's been proven.
For example, you can't have peace in a large group because some section of it is always going to emerge out as a dominant force and seize power, then I think that a better thing to do than resigning yourself is probably to do some research to find a way to subvert the problem.
I recently learned about something called a "reverse dominance hierarchy" from this incredible playlist on YouTube, just "What is Politics?", and it talks about a reverse dominance hierarchy, which is essentially the majority enforcing their will on either the leadership or potential leadership, anybody who could potentially emerge as a dominating force in a hierarchy, and the example of this is given through an anthropological perspective of how humans used to behave in small hunter-gatherer groups. And some good examples were given, like of a researcher who was befuddled by why his gift of this extremely meat, fat-heavy ox or whatever he was giving to the people was being received with lots of jeering jokes, and eventually the explanation of why got to him, and it's because they didn't want him to become full of himself, because he was extremely proud of this gift he was giving to them.
Essentially, what they did is a collective ego check. They were like "Hey buddy, you're not this hot shit just because you got this fancy-ass bull." You know, we're all going to enjoy it, but like, that doesn't make you better than somebody else, better than the other hunters or whatever.
He just purchased it, right? So there's also that, just because you have money doesn't mean that you have skills.
I don't know, I think that the idea of people being collectively trained, essentially, to like "roast" anybody who gets too full of themselves, maybe in the form of like, extremely seething political satire that reaches a very prominent level, or just like a culture that appreciates that sort of idea.
If you're a dictator and you ban satire, if you ban making fun of the government, that's a sign right there of insecurity. It means that you can't take a joke.
If you can't take a joke, then you're just a bad leader, because people who take themselves too seriously, it's like they're looking for something that's "perfectly correct" and wanting to be there already. Essentially, it's like "Oh, the system we've got is perfect, you can't criticize it in any way whatsoever." That seems like a weakness.
If you have a self-reforming system that's able to be critical of itself, then that one's eventually going to grow stronger than the one that is based off of the authority of saying "Oh yeah, we've got everything right." At least, that's what I think, even if there maybe are some advantages in the short term to having one that can, essentially, act as more of a unified force because there is that lack of self-critique.
So, here's an idea for achieving world peace: how about we have an institutionally supported, widespread culture of "Haha, you think you're a big shot but you're actually just a piece of shit!" sort of thing. We can still, you know, appreciate people's accomplishments, of course, but like some way of making sure that people don't get too full of themselves.
Like, if you're a leader, you should still be humble. You don't want to be thinking of yourself as this "important glorified person" who's gonna lead everybody to, you know, the promised land, because by the point that you're thinking that, you're already in like, delusion land, and you're not gonna do what it is that you need to do, because in your mind, you've already accomplished it, sort of.
You've got to be humble, you've got to be down at the same level of the goals that you wanna accomplish. And be like "Okay, it's this far away" and you know you can't do it all on your own, so really what you are is you're just somebody that's there to help make decisions, help make decisions for everybody.
Unless, of course, you're in a totalitarian society, and then you're making decisions because you have the ability to. And then what protects you from critique? It's like a vast bureaucracy. Once you have institutional power or a monopoly on violence or something about that, you don't have to worry about people forming their own factions because if they ever get too discontent you can always just, you know, go out and quell them quickly.
If you have control over the information flow, then the information of that quelling can be either reframed or removed entirely. From my understanding, this is similar to how China works, their governmental system.
So why do I think about this stuff all the time? Why? What am I doing with it? I could just ramble about it, right? I could just ramble like I am right now and then give it to the world and be like, "Hey, yo, I did a bunch of CBD oil and I'm talking about all this heavy-handed shit, all right, take this, do whatever you're gonna do with it, and don't ask me to write a book or anything because I'm too lazy for that."
I guess maybe if it was something that was important enough, and other people agreed that it was an important idea that needed expanding on, then I wouldn't just write a book myself, right? Because other people can help do research, too. Once they grasp the nature of the idea, then they can also help expand on it on ways that probably I couldn't see, so it would be more like a group project sort of thing. I may not even be the most qualified person to lead that project. The best thing for me might be to be there to wave a flag and be like "hey, we're getting off course from the main idea here which is how to achieve world peace, or whatever, and ways to obtain it".
I guess that's where I come into it, is like, okay, you're thinking about all these things that are so freaking huge, where do you actually put them to use? And then I say to myself, "Do I know enough to put it to use?" I essentially have to qualify myself, I have to say "Okay, yes, you do know enough in order to say something about it."
This does kind of get back to the critique that I think I heard from Revolutionary Blackout Network, where they're basically saying, "Oh, you don't need to have all these fancy pins and badges in order to speak your mind" and that's kind of the beauty of social media. I don't know, for right now, I'm just talking to myself at the suggestion of somebody else.
I've done this before, it's just... the only way to do this is to be completely frank about everything. So I have a Gulag to help me out. What is it that thefed said, so he did a very good job at making me think about what it would be like to get old, and I think that the point behind the statement was essentially, "Hey, you don't have forever, you've gotta do something at some point."
That might just be my own meaning that I'm assigning to it. That might not have been the intention, the intention might have just been, "Oh this young whippersnapper, just wait until he gets arthritis" or whatever, but that was my intention -- or my interpretation, is basically saying that you don't have an infinite amount of time. Which would be awesome.
It'd be awesome to have enough time and mental capacity to investigate every relevant subject to the absolute fullness over the course of like 20 years and then to put those ideas all together in a coherent fashion and present them in a way that makes sense and is accepted and yada yada yada. Basically, if I had an infinite amount of time, if I had a Hyperbolic Time Chamber from Dragonball Z and I could just go in there and do just a stupid amount of research, and then come out with all the answers to everybody's problems, that would be awesome. That would be awesome.
It would be a lot of hard work, but you know, hopefully you wouldn't be researching ALL the time, and you could like, stop and play some video games, or at the very least, fucking play some video games on the side of listening to a podcast, which is like my favorite thing to do. Maybe it only reaches the ears of some people that need to hear it. I gotta put more faith in the freakin' universe.
I told Victor once something about myself, and that's "I type a lot of things that I don't send." and this is true. I'm too apprehensive, I'm such an apprehensive person, and that really extends to my communications as well. I'll type something out, and then I'll ready it, and I'll be like "Okay, how does this come across? Is this really what I want to communicate?" and sometimes, it's what I think I wanna communicate, but after I think about it, I realize "Oh no, you know, that's not actually what I really wanted to say, what I was really trying to say was this." After I have a moment to stop and think about it I start over and start again.
Of course, this is probably hilarious to the other end in situations where there's like a "typing" notification, which is why I really prefer modes of communication like IRC that don't have a "so-and-so is typing" notification, because otherwise you just see me typing for like, what, fucking half an hour? and then out comes one sentence that just has the meaning that I want to communicate.
If it were me on the other end of that, I would be like "What is it that that person was actually thinking? What were they thinking?"
Nobody has ever asked me that, nobody has ever been like "Okay, what is it you spent all that time typing?" but if they did, I would probably say just what it was, which is, I was thinking about what to say and wanted to be careful, or something along those lines. Like, I didn't want to say the wrong thing accidentally and so I was trying to think over what it was that I wanted to communicate.
I don't know if it's manipulative to not have an essentially stream-of-consciousness effect, but I don't think it is, because the same people that I send messages like that to I talk to over voice, where I basically have no qualms with having a whole stream-of-consciousness thing going on. I think maybe it can be if what your intention is is to get either a specific type of reaction out of somebody or to motivate them in a certain way, to have a certain perspective that is like, in your interest, or whatever.
You just shouldn't manipulate other people. You should let them figure shit out on their own. Do your best. If you present something to them and they don't see what you want them to see out of it, then you need to accept that. You can't try and force it. What did lemnean call it? "Prying open your third eye."
You shouldn't try and pry open other people's third eyes. Like, I think that there's some kind of cosmic irony in the sense that if you wanna be more aware of things, it has to be something that comes from -- you have to consent to that process. You have to want to become more aware of things, or you have to want to look for things, it has to be your decision. Somebody else can't make that decision for you. And maybe they never will, I mean, maybe it'll take them a long time, or maybe they never will at all.
I really don't think that using fear is the right motivator, I don't think that being like, "Oh you need to figure this out soon or else you're gonna explode!" is the right idea. Because then they might not necessarily want to be aware of certain things, or want to know things, they're doing it for a different reason, they're doing is part of the survival instinct, self-preservation.
Even if you're motivating them in the direction of certain information, I don't know, I feel like it has to be tainted in some way from not being the honest intention of the person who's learning it. Let's say somebody essentially is being threatened, right, like "If you don't learn the truth behind this conspiracy" like let's say it's the JFK assassination. That's the best one I think I can use. "If you don't learn the truth behind the JFK assassination, we're gonna kill your whole family. Right?
And then they present you with a bunch of material that contains all of the information behind the JFK assassination from the perspective of the people who actually did it, and just all of the government documents, everything, basically it's all laid out in front of you. So would you be more or less likely to actually take in this information?
If that happened to me, if somebody was like "All right, this is a huge conspiracy, you need to learn about it, or we're going to do this" like what would the interest be? How can I accept that you would genuinely have my best interest at heart in pursuing that information, because if you're somebody who's willing to like threaten things that I care about, I have a very good reason not to trust you if I can't just talk to you and be like "Hey, can you not do that?" and then be like, "Okay, all right." Like why would I trust you if I can ask you "Please don't kill my family" and you're just like "Nah, we're gonna do it anyway if you don't do what we want, that would make me more likely to believe that whatever it is you're presenting me with has more to do with some motivation that I don't know about because I can't trust you. You know, how we decide to trust people, that's a whole other fucking rabbit hole.
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