#251

If a human being makes an honest attempt at formulating their decisions with an eye towards eliminating hypocrisy in their existential process, they will find their field of action severely limited. Depending on a variety of contexts, and depending also on the individual's ability to detect manifold contradictions, this may even mean that no action is possible, ever, anywhere. 

Similar is the human being who attempts to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A lifetime defined by silence, broken only by the most pitiful banality and gross utility.

Ethics: the art of saying and doing as little as possible. 

Morality: the art of civilization; the best lie, the greatest hypocrisy.

*

Can't stop yourself from drawing breath, can't command your internal homeostasis to just halt, your heart muscles do how they do, you piss and shit, you answer to what you're answerable for.

Who is "good"? Who is "bad"? Jesus Christ, was a question ever so fundamentally beside the point? No one knows what they're doing. No one knows what they do. 

You literally cannot describe even a tiny part of reality without lying. In its distortion of Truth, every truth is a lie.

You literally cannot exist for a single second without killing, without snatching resources from others who need them just as much as you do, and every lie you make up to justify or obscure this truth is hypocrisy and the root of more hypocrisy.

*

Let us strike this bargain with ourselves, I say, incorporating a hypothetical in order to feel less alone: ethics are personal, subjective, inviolate and complete unto the singular, but inevitably and mainly rely on and are deviled by compromise with morality, the public ethic, the inherited good, the perceived health of that thing, society, on which our luxury to consider our ethics and the basis for discarding them both rest equally.

*

The whole thing really is profoundly fucking stupid, and we all have to pay for the right to exist to boot. So whatever, fuck me up, see if I give a damn. As an act of faith, as a singular and personal choice, I do my best to hew to what I think is right and honest, and even though there is no good or truth, I hold myself answerable to my understanding of the concepts and accept their problems thereby; answerable to my own idealized social contract, to a purely theoretical, even fantastical society: a kingdom of heaven. 

Existence is a dark glass house, a palace of horrors and wonders--all illusions. We won't see the actual color of the light, or what is really being illuminated, until we step outside. Or further in.

--JL

#112

Man, I'm gonna take the ads off when I finish this post. I saw them on a friend's phone and they were just nasty. Not aesthetic. I don't need that shit around at any price or advantage.

*

Inevitable as the pandoria of ills that uniquely plague the human organism may be, the sublime element is just as inexorable and everpresent. 

*

Thinking specifically of rape, suicide, murder, torture, war, genocide, and enslavement (fun post today, folks), the arrangement can be seen as helical: each consistently interfering and interweaving with one another and with the life of everyone I have ever known in brutal, undeniable, and direct terms, and each constantly interweaving themselves into and defining the life of the world, that thing we call history.

That the political is personal has always seemed to me an unnecessary statement. That information is in definition one of the word "political" and also in a very popular and apt definition of what a human being is, which is a political animal. Presented as a sinecure for the attitudes of apolitical or politically apathetic people, I don't understand who they're kidding. People know that. They understand exactly why they don't give a flying fuck. They take it personally.

I am much more interested in the human as a historical animal, in human beings as subjects for whom the historical is personal; the animal with a historical sense for whom the history of the world--not the history of the nation or the family or the tribe or the state, but for whom the history of all humankind is personal. Apolitical attitudes are whatever to me, but ahistorical or historically disingenuous or apathetic attitudes seem to me far, far more damaging and poisonous. 

Our political lives would, I think, improve dramatically if more people were exposed to and understood more history from more places about more people, and took it seriously. 

*

For a while, at least. There is no permanence in any improvement, victory, ground gained, or agreements reached. Sad fact, but even the very best and seemingly eternal of our words and deeds can only last but a little span of time, are born as doomed to the fate of the temporal as any one of us. 

Gotta believe that little while is worth it while it lasts, though. That this terrible, implacable DNA adds up to something that can transcend its nature even for a moment. That the whole thing can work because it is mirrored by another helix, one of kindness, healing, respect, peace, freedom, creativity, joy, honor, wisdom, generosity material and of thought and spirit, and numberless other proteins. 

Because of who I am, I believe the latter helix carries more weight, bears more significance than the former. I hope this is true in general, that the math checks out, but for me, it is the truth.

*

Okay, try to have a good day, everybody. I am excited to go to work and to walk in the pretty snow to get there. It is cold and February is hard and this climate thing, well, dang, but spring's still coming.

Be well.


--JL