Thank Goodness for Deep Sleep

I sleep peacefully as dog farts descend over my hapless head.

Societies Built on Choppy Seas

It seems to me as if in order to calculate social outcomes, we project our own selves on to others. Given our subjective nature, and the diversity in minds, this could lead to incongruencies and error, lending to a dissonant socialscape.

However as we gather more knowledge, and our minds become more objective, we can begin to understand one another universally and establish social harmony.

Ideally, of course. Chances are probably better that societies will continue to flourish as strange, buzzing power structures, held tight against the internal thrashing of egos in conflict.

Rights

Rights are particular to mankind, a human creation. But they are the inevitable result of an advanced civilization; they bloom in civilized countries like flower petals out of a bud and as a society grows sick they seem to wither and fall away. Though once you have witnessed the beauty of them, the idea cannot go away, not if they are documented and shared. Others behold their beauty and proceed to grow their own, even before witnessing them first hand themselves.

Rights are inevitable because as our society advances, we grow insulated to the natural world. We arrive at the top of the food chain, and so the only direction we can kill for gain is horizontally, in other words, each other. As this practice progresses itself, we grow disgusted of it while we are simultaneously becoming sensitive and soft thanks to the comforts of advanced society. We desire stability, we apply the golden rule of ethics and establish universal rights.

I find the concept of rights so beautiful, I apply them retrogressively to other forms of life, since I apply human standards of conscious to everything to compensate for our ignorance of their subjective experience. Human beings supposedly have the most exquisitely sensitive of consciousness, so it would seem safe enough to judge on this criteria.

I still experience cognitive dissonance when I eat meat, though I'm not yet ready to come off of it. I just hope we eventually find a way to divorce ourselves from the practice. However, even trees have shown to exhibit stress signals when others are cut down in their proximity. What is pain and fear and is it relative? This experience can be traced to the original life form. Where to draw the line? Why not curl up in a ball and die, lest we step on another weed that shrieks in pain and sorrow in its own way. For all the physical comforts we enjoy as a civilized society, I think the intellectual experience has become proportionately more arduous.

Schopenhauer once made a statement about the proportion of good to evil in the world. He was a pessimistic philosopher, though he called himself a realist. Thus his opinion was something along the lines of this: Just compare the relative feelings of an animal enjoying another animal as a meal, and the feelings of the animal being devoured.

For fear of becoming paralyzed before the horrors of the natural world, I tell myself that steak is absolutely delicious. And it truly is. The best we can do now is make slaughterhouses more humane, if that's possible, with quicker, painless deaths. Until we can wean ourselves off of meat altogether. As we advance, this option is more than possible. And it is better for everyone involved, including the environment.

Cracks

Going to parties and clubs, (when I found myself out and about anyways, which is a rare thing these days), I began to notice the fragmented state of the social status of the local youth. People gaze in all directions, some cramming their faces into their opened cellphones, their faces glowing ghostlike. Conversations follow jagged paths of semi-reciprocity, the participants only understanding each other in intervals. I know this phenomenon subjectively. Eye contact is sometimes agonizing, especially for me, as I have to calculate all of my social interactions. It doesn't come naturally. And my head is filled with so many conceptions of what is to be accepted social discourse, it seems I grow anxious trying to calculate and integrate at the same time. Judging from others' behavior, it seems this is more widespread, though this could simply be bias on my part, where I project my own experiences on to others.

Nevertheless, I observe fragmentation. Cliques of people comfortable with each other are atomizing, growing smaller, specializing into smaller groups. Curious, this runs parallel with Gene Sharp's characterization of a society oppressed by a dictatorial state.

Of course, calling our country a dictator state is nothing short of hyperbole, but still, the parallel remains.

Some social scientists talk about instances where there is a loss of centralized and coherent values to be provided to the general population by the ruling class. According to their observations, this loss of a group of values results in a society that fractures, and these fractures permeate all the way into the individuals themselves, resulting in split selves. These split individuals in turn have trouble communicating coherent values to their children, thus perpetuating an atomized society.

A split self is then ripe for two main options:

1. The split individuals can proceed to reinvent themselves, manually putting back the pieces. This can result in bold new ideas and the reinvigoration of civilization.

2. The split individuals, upon perceiving an elevated, grandiose self and a depressed pathetic self, proceed to retain the grandiose and reject, eject, and project the pathetic onto symbols they perceive to be the enemy (scapegoating). They do this while cementing relations with other like-minded individuals in an us versus them schema, thus giving sway to fundamentalist, authoritarian movements.

I think this phenomenon happens in cycles throughout the course of history, and I think we are experiencing this as a civilization right now. There are many of us currently trying to reinvent ourselves, and then there are those of us sitting around complaining about Muslims and wishing that everyone was living in the 19th century again. Thus our polarization.

There are some scholars who worry that bona fide fascism could again take hold, and in American soil no less. Though this is a popular buzzword sloppily used to smear opponents on either side of the political spectrum, the actual pathology could very well rise again, just in a uniquely American form. This possibility is real.

I see terrible splitting in my own family, culminating in the frayed ends of rope that are my brother and I, the strange creatures that we are.

I just hope we can all figure something out before the other guys.