Is this all just a mall?

It seems like every day there a new suspension or ban on the major social media platforms and it's just getting to be too much. Too many people locked out of accounts. Too many hard to understand reasons for it. There is no recourse.

In brilliant blog post from 2010, sociologist Zeynep Tufekcia used a mall analogy to describe Facebook. She explains, it's a highly controlled/surveilled space, specifically designed to push you towards buying crap and the owners can kick you out pretty much whenever they feel like it.

That description always stuck with me. Because when you take a step back, it seems like a silly thing (getting kicked off a social media site). It's something we used to laugh about and decry the overzealous mall cops giving you trouble. Yet these days, social media bannings feel more...upsetting. More oppressive.

Wrong side of 30

According to my meticulous examination of multiple Wikipedia pages, there are four stages of life for those who choose to follow the Vedic way of Hinduism, namely: student, householder, retired/forest dweller and renunciation/ascetic. You get the general idea of what each stage entails from their names. If you graphed it, it would look like a single peaked mountain measuring earthly attachment over time.

We're born naked, the number of possessions starts at zero. Over time we build up social, occupational and material attachments, receiving aid and mentoring from the older generation. A drag on parents and society for a time but with promise of a brighter future. Eventually the child becomes a man, the student becomes the householder, the net negative becomes a net positive, producing food and wealth that sustains a family and people in other stages of life. All the while living graciously and virtuously.

"Burn the damn thing down"

"Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill." -From Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia

The world we live in is constantly melting. Sometimes the change is fast and sometimes it's slow but it never stops. It seems helpful to say "the external world" is what's changing while the "internal world" stays constant but even that isn't true. Our physical bodies are constantly changing too - cells are dying and being replaced.

The way to survive change is to adapt, which sounds duplicative. Adaptation is just more change right? Sort of, but for the sake of this essay, change is out of your control while adaptation is in your control. The key part of adaptation is intentionality. A human or animal makes intentional changes in order to survive. The crazy part is that change and adaptation occurs simultaneously. Your skin cells are dying while you are intentionally putting on sunscreen to protect those exact cells, and it repeats and repeats. But all this complexity makes one's head spin. Let's limit the thought experiment to the "external" world changing and the "internal" world adapting.

Goodbye Darwin

We live in an age where central bankers are politicians and the bills we carry in our pockets are ideological battle grounds. Rather than retelling the grimy myths of our past, the artwork on our bills is supposed to lead us forward to a future of equanimity and peace. Andrew Jackson is apparently getting booted from the $20 bill soon, to be replaced by abolitionist Harriet Tubman. To be sure, Tubman is eminently worthy of recognition, but is Jackson not? Jackson was a first generation immigrant, orphaned at 14, from humble means who built himself into a president of the US consistently ranked in top 10 historically. That seems to set a solid example for a first generation Mexican immigrant growing up right now in Riverside or El Paso.

The Bank of England is no different than the US Federal Reserve when it comes to tinkering with their bills. Since the year 2000, a bust of Charles Darwin has been featured on the £10 note in the UK. In a few weeks, he will be replaced with author Jane Austen. It's unclear exactly why Darwin is getting removed but it certainly fits with the theme of heavy handed ideology pushing. Again, not that Jane Austen is unworthy. But Darwin is such a large historical figure that it seems wrong to rotate him out.

Black and white and gray

Telling someone that they are stuck in "black and white" thinking is a modern day insult. It conjures images of the 16th century papacy wrongly insisting that the earth is the center of the universe in the face of Galileo's insights. Or more recently, the insult is applied to Christian fundies for their strict and wrong interpretations of the bible. Duality thinking is seductive because it makes the world terrifyingly easy to understand. Light and darkness, good and evil, body and soul, water and fire, ones and zeros. It's beautiful in it's minimalistic perfection. Especially when you place your team on one side and everyone else on the other side. Heaven and hell, life and death, black and white, straight lines, perfection.

We sew duality into our stories to make them captivating. Look no further than the book series that produced the first (and only) billionaire author on the planet. Millennials love Harry Potter so much that they single handedly revived a previously lame Los Angeles theme park. And who can blame them for resonating with an epic tale of good versus evil? Add butterbeer to the mix and boom, literary hit of the century.

Irresistible Icarus

Philosophy is not a popular topic at brunches and nor should it be. Learning how to die is not a merry subject. A truly enlightening conversation is often an uncomfortable one and thus an impolite one. In fact, the best time to talk philosophy is after your audience has consumed a bongs-worth of weed. In that case, everyone is too stoned to remember how rude you were.

For the introspective few, philosophy and truth feel like an inescapable pursuer. The muse sticks with you like an earworm. It's a form of possession which drives its host deeper and deeper into the woods. In Christianity, this possession is called the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Non-Christians don't agree on a word for it but are affected by it just the same.

Dreaming of Nirvana

Progressives in the west are so drawn to Indian philosophy. In gardens from Berkeley to Madison, small Buddha totems smile motionless next to gopher holes. If not in their gardens, tiny silent Buddha is placed on their stand-up desk. If not on their desks, a nice picture of a waterfall stamped with curly text ending with "-Buddha" is set as their desktop background. Zen is an office buzzword.

There are various reasons people put Buddhas on their desk. For some, it's an outstretched hand to exotic foreign culture, an offering to the Gods of Globalization. For others it's a shred of hope in a dark world of suffering, a Jesus of their own making. It could even be a way to manipulate your boss.

Eugenics are Whack

Duck! The environment is trying to kill you!

People joke about the Darwin Award which hypothetically goes to a person killed doing something stupid. The truth is, a person doesn't even have to do something stupid to get killed off. The environment is a hostile force, as anyone who has gotten poison oak can attest, which makes me question the mental state of so-called ecosexuals. Darwin said it very eloquently and precisely and people listened. The environment comes at us in waves and we sink or swim. The waves vary in size and intensity. The waves come from various directions and with various speeds. Wits, strength, grit and luck (and sanity) keep us alive.

Love For Hoffer

“Why the in the world did I come here”

I came because I'm a romantic. I’m always searching for the next high but I don’t do drugs. I’m always searching for revelations, making pilgrimages to places I think might be holy. But there are no holy places anymore. There are only holy moments.

As I turned the corner and saw the patch of grass where it was supposed to be, I doubted it was there. A public art installation dedicated to a man, a hero, who didn’t fit in, and not in a shy but charming sense. In a reclusive, grumpy, kind-of-an-jerk sense. His ideas are alternately uplifting and depressing and his life mostly dull. Yet I wish I was more like him. A blue collar pedigree, yet a philosopher's soul. What a combination.

Theseus

If the earth is 4.5 billion years old, our planet has rotated on its axis approximately one and a half trillion consecutive times so far. Does that make tomorrow's rotation a given? No. If every person you’ve ever met has exactly ten fingers, can you make the conclusion that every person, ever, has exactly ten fingers? No. In both of those scenarios, a clear pattern is apparent.

Circa 1740, David Hume came up with the disturbing philosophical problem of Induction. It states that the past doesn't necessarily predict the future and assuming that it does is based on faith rather than rationality; pretty deep stuff from someone who spent a good stretch of his adult life employed as a librarian. Put a different way, believing in patterns is an exercise in piety. Most people naturally take this into account. We notice patterns and apply them until they don’t work anymore. Patterns are useful for efficiency. It's perfectly reasonable to use apparent patterns to develop systems, in fact, it's the most reasonable thing one could do.

Timeline Compressed

Transcendent figures often seem out-of-place in their time. It’s as if they were actually members of the future but were accidentally born too early.

Generally a writer of true force/originality is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation. So therefore he starves, goes mad, suicides, and is only recognised if portions of his work are somehow found later, much later, in a shoebox, say, or under the mattress of a whorehouse bed, you know. -Charles Bukowski

These figures are sometimes writers, sometimes scientists, sometimes philosophers. But during their lifetime, they are not appreciated. Politicians are always appreciated during their lifetime because everything that matters to them is here on earth, power. Without power they aren’t important. So this only applies to people whose contribution is on a non-temporal level. Wouldn’t it be great for humanity if that timeline is compressed and we appreciate what we have? Appreciate the transcendent figures before they perish? I think it’s possible. But first let me digress into how transcendent figures are actually far from transcendent.