The Click

Now this is crucial.

This is revolutionary language.

This is a window into a new consciousness, couched in political language to be sure. But nevertheless, this is hinting at a fundamental paradigm shift in the human organism.

Week ???

Spending more time in Long Beach now, I realize that my conclusions were premature. There's more nuance in the populace. Of course, there's always more nuance. Probably more nuance than can be expressed with language.

Like the suburbanites, some city dwellers are friendly, and then some express xenophobia after all. But unlike the suburbanites who usually demonstrate a tribalistic xenophobia, this xenophobia is universal. They avoid contact with really anything on the streets. Some pull off remarkable thousand mile stares and won't even respond to you if you say hello.

Some look even more fearful than the suburbanites themselves. But of course there's fear everywhere. It's, as they say, ubiquitous.

On an evolutionary level, it makes sense. With higher stress levels, we're going to be more keenly aware of perceived threats, and that could be anything that's remotely foreign. Some researchers have noted that aggregate stress levels rise with inequality levels, since there's a larger gap between success and failure, and an accompanying pressure to perform. Intriguing observation but I'm still trying to understand.

I actually find myself completely fascinated with anything foreign, but when it comes to interacting I become nervous. One person had a good point: with high stress, one becomes anxious about whether they can relate to someone else. Social discourse becomes a matter of performance. What does it all mean?

Really the best thing to do would be to relax and try to let it flow. But then I'm drawn back to analysis...to laboring over ideas and answers. But it takes a ton of information and deliberation to come up with a meaningful framework. And by then it is is slowly becoming irrelevant with time. Or you try a different angle and it lights up an entirely different framework with different possibilities. The answer is in group intelligence of course. With many minds applying themselves, we gain a new dimension of understanding. Analogous to the difference between a two dimensional figure and a three dimensional one I suppose. Really all this pain and blindness and uncertainty is a result of the individual straining to lift something that requires more sources of force than one.

Yeah but it comes and goes. Inspiration, elation, creation, and then periods of isolation and despair. And out there in media-space the national mood is black. Something big is coming.