A car crashes and people die, the witnesses tell people how they felt about what happened, what a surprise it was to them that it happened, how they were ill prepared for it happening, how it has potentially impacted the thing that they were on their way to do. It’s almost impossible for them to detach their own personal needs from what happened. My dad pointed this out to me long ago and I have observed it ever since.
Now that makes me wonder if it is possible for me, and it’s not all about me you know, to be objective in my judgement? If we can call this blog something that I do, as if it matters, can I look at a situation, critique it, form an opinion on it, then write about it, without injecting my own personal feelings into my output? Actually I doubt if I can. So why would it, how could it, be of any use to anyone else, or me, and how can I avoid being the hero of my narrative? Specifically because I am not the interesting thing about my blog (I hope).
We have all met that person, ever the hero of their own narrative, they will bore you nearly to death with stories where they had to step in to save the day. An utter yawn fest, one that I hope I am not a regular participant in in either my writing or my daily conversations. I’ve met hundreds of these types, there story is always the same, where they saved the day in some banal way. Are they ever interesting? Maybe sometimes yes, but it takes quite a charisma to present it, it must have an element of usefulness to carry it, and it needs to give me something to think about, to be a worthwhile listen. Someone asked me recently, “just how good a snooker player were you?“, my answer was that it didn’t really matter now that I do not play anymore, and that maybe we should go back to talking about snooker in general, and not me. The reason is that I just did not wish to be the drop in the ocean that tries to be the description of the entire ocean, there’s too much ego in that for me.
Why does our perspective on truths often lean toward our practical desires? What I think is that the better feelings to be gained are found when absorbing those things that agree with what you already think, for the ideologically left leaner it is the work of Marx and Marcuse, for the opposite on the right it is Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. What is uncomfortable is to absorb that media that disagrees with what you fundamentally think, yet I would contend that to fully understand why you think the way you do, this is the very material you should seek to understand. Staying within your comfortable narrative is of no use to you as far as growth, so I often try to hear what I disagree with, and thankfully I find that material easily.
It is so very easy to be agreed with, and it is pleasant, but without challenge you may become too sure that what you lean towards is a destination of knowledge, a conclusion you have arrived at. “Museum of ideas built for loafers in the garden of knowledge”, is the cutting quote from the great Rick Roderick. What he means is lazy historical perspective, the sort where you find what agrees with the way you feel and then rest on that as an enabling factor of your confidence in approaching every subjective aspect you encounter. What people describe as “my philosophy” What I take is that it is possible to make philosophy about your perspective rather than to have it challenge it. To find a philosophical, scientific, sociological, psychological, historical, or other, postulate that allows you to feel good about whatever, possibly bat-shit crazy, way you would personally arrange the objects of the universe if you had the power to do so.
We cannot actually make the world about us because we have little power, so we make the narrative about us by finding the narrative that so closely fits us, then we adhere to it as if it was adhering to us. We strain the narrative through interpretation so as to make it appear that we are a convert to it, that its logic has won us over and we have acquiesced to its greater knowledge of the world. In truth there is no two believers in an ideology that align completely, there are no two Christians that express the same Christianity, this is because they are fallible humans with differing fears and desires, and for each they have a different need from the ideology. But that doesn’t stop them from failing to argue and strip away like Hegel encourages us to do, in fact we often see the opposite, the carrying of thoughts that we would not agree with if we stopped to think about them. Acceptance, faith, these are not completely fixed positions without conflict still buried somewhere within them, they are close-enough perspectives that allow the adopters to shut off the rest of their critical faculties.
I met one of these people recently, a guy who appeared to be religiously motivated, in that he used his religious perspective to avoid solving the paradox that it creates and cannot argue with. Nietzsche is brilliant on this in his criticisms of Christianity (On The Genealogy Of Morals), that it cannot solve the inherent problems it creates, so it instead encourages its followers to bury their heads in the sand and repeat untruths. Sort of an action in the other direction, with only the purpose of looking like an action. Highly focussed inaction we might call it. Somewhat like running in the opposite direction to where you might be needed, and highlighting that you are actually running, as if the running is more important and praiseworthy than addressing the need. The problem for Christianity is that it is the source of many of the problems it tries to look like it is participating in solving, inequality is both underpinned by scripture in an enabling way, and fought against by the followers of scripture in rhetoric and sometimes deed, as if it weren’t responsible. I think that they should be more true to the scripture and just stop feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless at holiday times, then at least we could say they are being consistent.
Back to our guy.. I met him through his association with someone I am also associated with, that is as far as I will go in describing the link between us, and only for the reason that I do not wish to have a further argument with that person over their, from my perspective, bad life choices. His problem is that he is a dreadful human being because of his perspective and his desires (IMHO). Solipsistic, power seeking, ego driven, cruel of intent, short of charity, and in need of praise and validation through adherence and accumulation, his solution to realising this was to find that ideology that allows these personal traits to be viewed from a positive angle. This is one of the functions of religion, especially stoic religions such as the Abrahamic ones, that they reinterpret bitterness and hatred as love and charity. He did not only find one that did this, he joined its extremist supporters gallery then headed for the top job, collecting badges of honour on the way.
What our guy does is to seek validation, power, safety, and the quelling of conscious, from the edicts of the prescribed ideology of a structure that was primarily created for the purpose of falsely masking the acts of oppression, domination, and cruelty, enacted on some valid historical citizens of a land by other citizens of that land who were placed there by a dominant empire, under a cloak of noble piety. To clarify that, he is a member of a church based pressure group that identifies itself as a militia who are self anointed, self ennobled, and self validated by their writings of interpretation concerning their particular deity’s wishes for them to defend the lands their ancestors had taken by force, and if that means bloodshed then so be it. These folks see themselves somewhat as warrior Knights, theirs is a need for violence primarily, not a willingness to it as a last resort, for most of them are in the fan club and not on the main team. It is expressed by adopting what they believe to be a higher cause. It is often the case that the debauched individual hides in an ideology that validates their debauchery, like a church, the violent psychopath hides also in the militia, or at least in its fan base, in the same way. The only thing preventing their presence on the field is that they lack the real courage to participate, so they may wave a banner, or use words instead. Not that some of them would not be participants if they had advantage, there are violence-able persons in every cohort of course, but I suspect for most this is rhetoric only, and easy bravado in the circumstances.
Now in this we can spot that sort of heavily right-wing Christianity that is so easily identified with an American, or Israeli, protectionist perspective, sort of guns combined with “god on our side”. For our guy there is no conflict between the violence and the book, the book enables the violence, and their idea of an established peace. For some of us that is problematic because we are more likely to reach out to rationale to justify conflicts rather than dogma, but that may just be in modernity and because we no longer have kings that command us into their land-grabbing actions justified by their interpretations of their books. Jus ad Bellum, Jus in Bello – these predate Christianity, they mean the justice of conflict, and the justice in conflict (classical Greek/Roman, possibly earlier, almost certainly having equivalents in eastern teachings). It is no coincidence that other members of this religious extremist movement align themselves with the same perspective our guy does, I’m talking about toward the US and Israel perspective, and every other country that was founded on principles that ignore any ideas of historical property rights, choosing to go with might is right. It is not a rational position to take that any force is correct in a moral sense, if I am bigger than you and stronger than you I am not correct if I say a potato is a fruit and you disagree. The same applies to the thinking concerning morality in any of the philosophy you might read, it is not force based, it is argument based. Only religion and ideology uses might to achieve what appears to be within moral dominion.
Our subject joins the order to be among those that agree with his perspective, to be in its safe haven. It is my conjecture that he has that perspective pre-joining, that he looks for the group to be in, but where does the perspective come from originally? I would say that people are not born with prejudices, that they have to be taught them, this to me is obvious because prejudices arise within geographical regions and as a result of circumstances of power, there is no hatred of Latinos in North Korea because there are no Latinos in North Korea dominating trade, holding all the precious objects, and manipulating the worlds of finance and media. That is not to say that if there were, there would not be hatred of them, but it would have to be created and nurtured and for some underpinning reason. The hatred of the Empires arose from the oppression they created when they took opportunities from some people for some reason and gave them to other people. It did not manifest just from them turning up, the first arrivals were often welcomed, and so was the period of trade that followed, before the riches were realised and troops were sent that is. Parents, who may have also been part of this order, are the most likely source, peer groups are the likely secondary, and the lack of persons to argue or offer perspective would offer a tertiary factor, as it often does.
It’s early 2022, my brother has just passed away. The guy, who I have just met, knows who I am and my thinking about certain things, but I know virtually nothing of him. He offers to me that he thinks “Israel should keep bombing Palestine until there are no people left there”, and I of course find this horrific because there are children in Palestine that do not deserve these bombs by any estimation. I am not ready to start arguing the merits of this or the multitude of other arguments that he has come pre-armed with, save to say that I disagree with most of it, and don’t think I would have bothered anyway as this guy is obviously zealot like. I figure I couldn’t have changed his mind with subjective argument, fact would put no dent in his wish-based belief, and we had no audience to convince so what would be the point other than to defend from an attempted intellectual attack of a personal nature for no other reason than to further bolster the adoration of the person who had pre-armed his perspective for reasons I can only speculate were to fluff his already enlarged ego?
I think this is a rather dim man with a bigot’s mind and a bully’s approach to discussion, so very Northern Irish that seems to be, and he has bushwhacked me because someone close to me thought it better to let him catch me out, rather than to grant me the peace I needed at the time. I really was not prepared for what came to be, though I am admittedly not ever that great at arguing in this confrontational way. I tend to avoid entrenched positions and try to reason with the reasonable, rather than to engage in the type of verbal conflict that can only be resolved by agreeing to disagree, or going to blows. His reasoning is based not in the provable truth of things, more on wishes, and relies on the ignorance of his tribe to carry it. This is often the case with the false confidence of the trope repeater, that they have not checked their dubious facts, sort of like a Trump or Bojo supporter in that way. Believe and repeat falsehoods and do so strongly, because the strength of conviction is often perceived and received as the strength of the argument! This is a falsehood, truths happen to be agnostic toward your emotional needs from them. He claims historical facts that are simply not so, and bases rights and wrongs on them as if they followed logically from the initial postulate, which they wouldn’t even if it were true, which it isn’t.
He feels ennobled, enabled, and justified to offer this perspective, and so sure of its validity, simply because he is, in most of his dealings, surrounded by people who would support his position without question because their wish for these non-facts is just as strong as his. You see it is my perspective that groups of awful people, like this guy, makes each member worse through tribal desire, just as groups of academics can make each other smarter through reasoned argument. It’s the same effect but with different results, ideas multiply within people groups, like bacteria multiplies in a Petri dish, because they have each other’s help and support. In the sense of seeking a truth that support would be the erosion of the false, in the sense of seeking validation that strength is found in the bolstering of belief despite the truth. Beliefs and truths are not of equal value, a belief we may argue, we may base conflict on, we may kill because of, we may dedicate a life to, but that does not convert it into a truth. A truth we cannot argue with unless we are fundamentally opposed to reason and science, like a flat-earther or a gravity denier.
For academics we strip off what does not belong because it does not pass criticism, in groups of dim-witted bigots, or conspiracists, or Trump supporters, falsehoods and mistruths grow because they are adopted unchallenged. The difficulty is in knowing how to apply objectivity to subjectivity if one wishes to prove a claim as a valid truth. Everything speculated, everything that is not provable, is a guess, and if it is a guess that is at odds with an existing truth then it is a bad guess. A proper guess can only remain where nothing to the contrary exists to prove it in error, and nobody that faces the destruction of their guess should continue to draw validity from following its trajectory. What these guessers almost always lack, and this is because of their own weakness in defending their position, is anyone present that would argue against their point or demonstrate a false nature, or any literature that would do the same. This is why they band together to discuss their false histories just within their chambers, coming out only in large number and making loud noises, and only within their tribe of carefully chosen men, and only from a position of strength in numbers in terms of potential violent action.
People will often give up their critical faculties to be part of a tribe, I have written about this before, but often that has little harm involved in it. For this subject, and this person, and the tribe I am describing in this piece, that is not the case. There is a demonstrable harm that continues to be foisted upon a large number of persons of the same lands as he occupies, one that is not supported by the Empire that primarily caused it any longer, yet remains strong among he and his cohort. That is not to say that among their opposite numbers there is not also myth based falsehoods, and that they are not just as bad in their extremism in the pursuit of what they wish to be true, of course they are, but that criticism I will keep for another day.
“Never wrestle with pigs, you both get dirty and the pig likes it” George Bernard Shaw
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