Over and over again, the media mouthpieces of the corporate oligarchy tell us that we are in “tough economic times” and that “things are tough all over”.

And we just take their word for it. They flash some impressively byzantine numbers at us, assure us that this means things are bad, and we just suck it down like chocolate pudding.

But what does “tough times” even really mean? Does anyone really know? You can talk about unemployment, housing starts, or the Dow Jones all day long, but when all is said and done, most of us have have no idea what any of those things really mean, or whether they even mean anything meaningful about the state of things at all.

So to most people, these words mean nothing intrinsically, but they are potent codewords spoken by the true God to which we are all enslaved : The Economy.

And what the priests of the great Mammon known as The Economy are truly saying to us is : lower your expectations. Put up with abuse at work because it’s so hard to find a job in This Economy. Don’t even think of asking for more… there is no way we could afford it in This Economy. In fact, you will be expected to take one for the team when you tighten your buckle and make do with less. Don’t dare complain… you should be glad you even have a job in This Economy.

And because we have all been taught to worship this false God called The Economy, we believe it. The Economy is angry. The Economy is withholding jobs and security from us because we did something very, very wrong. We strayed from the path laid down for us by the priests of The Economy, and now we must be prepared to do whatever it takes to appease The Economy so that it will smile upon us and grant us prosperity again.

And what do we do to appease The Economy? Why, whatever the bought and paid for priests of The Economy, the financial analysts and economists and stockbrokers, tell us to do, because the will of The Economy is mysterious and unknowable except to the chosen few, and so we have no choice but to just trust them that The Economy is how they say it is and works like they say it works.

This blind faith is expected of us despite how clear it is that these priests of The Economy work entirely for the wealthy elite and serve their interests, not ours. It is expected despite the very clear evidence that their advice almost never delivers the results they promise. It is expected despite the fact that the entire intellectual basis for their voodoo is riddled with unsupported suppositions, absurd simplifications, and a patently obvious lack of understanding the very human beings who make up the economy.

Because that is the big lie they so desperately want you to believe : that they, and only they, can understand the will of The Economy, and therefore, like any priest class, they act like they own The Economy.

But they don’t own it. They have simply snowed us into thinking they do. The economy, the real one not the false Mammon, is us. We are it, and it is we. It is our labour, our ingenuity, our perseverance, our blood and tears that generate an economy, and therefore this Economy god is nothing more than a golden idol used by the corrupt elites to distract us from our true power as consumers, as citizens, and as human beings.

They don’t own the economy. We do. It is ours. And like all things in a democratic society, we can do as we please with it and if it stops serving us, we are free – completely free – to change the rules until it does.

Stop believing their lies! It could not be clearer that the rules no longer serve the average global citizen, but instead serve to take money away from the many and pump it up to the few, with nothing trickling down.

Because as it turns out, rich people taking your money does not generate economic activity, especially in the modern age where risk is something the little people take and the rich can get richer without ever bothering to hire anybody or invest in anything.

They just pick a pony in the mass hysteria experiment known as the “stock market”, and if their pony wins, they keep the money, and if it loses, they just declare a shell corporation bankrupt and leave us, the little people, to pay for their poor luck.

This in no way helps those of us still living on Main Street. They have told us that it does, and that we should all care about the results of the latest horse race as much as they do, and get all sad when the Dow Jones goes down as if it is anything more than a meaningless aggregation of gambling decisions.

Now think about your lifetime. How often have you been told you were living in hard times? Who told you that? How many of the year of your life have been lived in hard times as opposed to good times?

And why has nobody ever actually told you “these are the good times”?

Because the very people in charge of the economy in our absence loathe “good times”. It is not in their best interests for people to start thinking things are good, because then they might just want a bigger slice of the pie and the wealthy elite would much rather keep it all for themselves, no matter how rich they are.

They want us meek and docile and undemanding, and above all, cheap. They have never liked having to value human life, and so they keep us thinking we are in hard times, and when that starts to be hard for the people to believe, they are not above deliberately crashing the whole economy in order to bring back those “hard times” (which for them are the “good times”) that they love so much.

Do you know what this means? We have left the economy – the real one – in the hands of doctors who do not actually want it to get better.

And yet, kings and governments (all run by the rich, of course) keep taking their advice.

Well enough is enough. We need to rise up as one global population, cast off the myth of The Economy, repair all the holes they have drilled in the rules that are supposed to protect us from them, and put in governments that get results… or else.

Because let me be clear…. while the world’s governments refuse to rein in the wealthy elite, they should not know a moment’s peace. Same for the elite themselves. Every peaceful effort must be made in order to make governments listen to the will of the people again.

And that means maximum resistance. There should be no place those in power can go where they will be safe from the voices of protesters. There should be no online forum where they can be safe from the opinions of those they oppress. There should be no protection from the people demanding that all funds connected to themselves, whether or not they have been entrusted to these priests of Mammon before in the form of retirement plans, be divested of all connections to corporate oligarchy. There should be no employee they can trust to remain in their employ once it is revealed how bestial they truly are, let alone trust with their secrets.

They act like they are gods but they feed on our blood. It is in our power to deny it to them. We are still in control, despite what they would like you to believe.

If we all divest, we can starve them. If we all protest, they will hear us.

If we all resist, we can stop them.

The question is… are we ready to do it?

Or would we rather let monsters run the world if it means we don’t have to bother and can go back to blissful ignorance while sociopathic corporations and their morally despicable masters rape us of our blood?

This is the choice we face, and we have to face it now, while there is still freedom left to protect. The politicians cannot solve problems for us when it is in their best interest not to solve them at all.

We the people can still take back the reins of power and shove aside the vampires and jackals who have tricked us into letting the foxes run the henhouses.

It only takes the will and determination to stand up and say “No more!”.

These monsters stand atop towers made of a meek and docile humanity.

Let’s show them just how far they have to fall, and MAKE THEM TUMBLE.

That’s all from me for today… talk to you tomorrow, folks.

I have tried to tackle this issue before but never got satisfactory results. Tonight, I will take another crack at it.

First of all, I need to clarify just what we are talking about. I am not talking about the role of ethics in science fiction media. There have been lots of science fiction tales that revolved around ethical questions, of course. In fact, those tend to be my favorite kind. But this article is not about them.

Instead, I will attempt to address the common ethical nature that forms the bedrock of science fiction. It is elusive and gets easily lost in the manifold diversity of science fiction, but there are actually certain moral foundations that run so deep in science fiction that we fans don’t even notice them most of the time.

If I had to summarize them, I would say they are the high minded ideals of liberal intellectuals. These are the very ideals that drive social progress and have brought us into the modern world, as well as being the highest ideals humanity has ever conceived.

For example, science fiction heavily favours freedom, especially freedom of thought and expression. Whether it takes place in an anarchist utopia or a fascist dystopia, science fiction makes it very clear which side it thinks is right, and it is nearly always the side of freedom.

Rare indeed is the science fiction story that suggests we would all be a lot better under authoritarian rule. The dictator might win or he might lose, but he’s almost never the hero. He’s never right.

Similarly, science fiction heavily favours diversity. This is a facet of science fiction’s strong belief in open-mindedness. Science fiction teaches us to think before we act, to step out of the herd and take a look around at what is really going on, and to question our beliefs constantly.

These are classic liberal virtues, and they are the virtues upon which modern society was built. Despite the infinite delusions in infinite variety of social conservatives, all modern societies were built by people who were the radical liberals of their era, just a bunch of crazy intellectuals with unrealistic ideals of freedom and equality, and it is exactly those kind of people who have been pushing society forward ever since.

Speaking of equality, that is another virtue science fiction promotes. It goes part and parcel with its belief in diversity. Science fiction believes that diversity is always a good idea and that the operating principle of diversity, namely tolerance, is a primary principle from which modern civilization springs.

The more we tolerate one another and are willing to just let people be who they are without judgment or suspicion, the more free society is and the better off we are as a species. The history of the twentieth century can be seen as a long struggle to learn to accept those different from us, and the process continues to this day and will probably continue well into the next century. We are still a young species, and we have so much to learn.

Speaking of learning, science fiction also believes in the value of knowledge, education, and, of course, science. Despite the proliferation of “What hath man wrought?” science fiction stories where science leads to a terrible catastrophe, science fiction believe in science, progress, and the value of teaching what we have learned to the next generation so that they can pick up where we left off.

In general, science fiction is strongly humanitarian. It seeks the well-being and comfort of all us crazy humans and even three headed green space men, if they are sentient like us. It embraces a very broad conception of compassion that encompasses all of humanity, even if that humanity is found in the body of an alien, a robot, or a cloud of plasma drifting through space.

A classic example of this higher compassion is my favorite Star Trek original series episode, The Devil In The Dark. In it, Kirk and Spock face a genuinely frightening and completely alien creature call the Horta, who by the time the episode starts has already killed 50 miners.

The miners, of course, want the thing dead, and if you are a human being watching the episode for the first time, so do you. Every instinct in our bodies says that if something kills us, we band together hunt it down and kill it, period.

These are the same instincts that made us deadly opponents despite our seeming weakness back in our hunter-gatherer days. Any predators that threatened us soon learned the error of their ways. We may seem weak as individuals, but when we band together, we can beat anything, no matter how big.

But Kirk sees past that. Even when Spock is ready to phaser the Horta into oblivion, Kirk tells him to hold up and it is then that we learn that the Horta is just protecting her eggs, and that if the humans leave her eggs alone, she will leave them alone. And Kirk then convinces the rest of the miners to forgo revenge for their losses and live in peace with the Horta that killed 50 of them.

That represents such a high ideal of understanding and compassion that it still leaves me breathless to imagine it. If Kirk and Spock had hunted down the Horta and killed it, few of us would have questioned it. That is what you do when animals threaten humans, let alone inhuman monsters. Even the highly civilized people of today simply accept this truth. We can live peacefully with the animals most of the time.

But if you threaten one of us, the deal is off.

And yet, Kirk listens to his heart and his mind instead of his primal instincts, and the folly of what they had been about to do to the Horta is revealed when the Horta uses its acids to etch these words on a piece of rock “NO KILL I”.

Those are the three most poignant words in all of science fiction, in my opinion.

So in more or less conclusion, the ethics of science fiction are the highest ethics of humanity : freedom, compassion, cooperation, tolerance, peace, progress, knowledge, and the never ending pursuit of higher morality that has driven humanity to this enlightened age and will drive it still further on, till one day the people of the future will look back at us and wonder how we endured lives of such chaos and savagery.

Some say that science fiction only appeals to intellectuals. I would counter that recent box office receipts belie that. But even if that was true, it is we intellectuals who push our societies to better themselves.

And by and large, it is science fiction that pushes us.

See you tomorrow, folks.

I have had thoughts about the sort of people who hate math (versus those who hate English class) and qualitative versus quantitative thinking running around in my head again lately.

I think it would be fair to say that there are qualitative people and quantitative people. Nobody can be completely one or the other, but there are people who are only comfortable with one or the other, and will always consider the other one to be alien and unreliable and unpleasant.

A qualitative person is most comfortable with thinking in terms of ideas and emotions rather than numbers and facts. They compare and contrast in order to get answers. They are comfortable with ambiguity, and in fact prefer it in some situations. They tend not to believe in Truth and they place a high value on relationships between things rather than the things themselves. The world of data and numbers and calculation seems very cold and unnatural to them, and liable to mislead people into making the morally wrong choices simply because the numbers told them to do it, or worse, be used to justify people being rotten to one another.

Quantitative people, by contrast, are quite happy in the world of numbers and data and calculation. It is ambiguity they dislike. They want to be able to find an answer, and anything which does not lead to a mathematically demonstrable answer is viewed as highly suspect. They believe in Truth and think there is an answer to all questions, no matter how seemingly qualitative, can be answered with sufficient data and the right questions. They are not interested in the vaguely defined world of relationships and instead seek answers via applying logical tools to analyze data, eliminate meaningless variables, and derive the answer in a quantitative form. They think that it is the qualitative world that leads people astray by giving immorality the space to hide in its ambiguity, and letting people go on thinking demonstrably wrong things by giving them an excuse to ignore the data and, indeed, reality itself.

Of course, I am somewhere in the middle. I am quantitatively biased, I will admit. If it can be solved through logical, number based analysis, it should be. But I know that a purely mathematical view of the world is limited in many ways. It is very easy for people to get lost in a forest of numbers, fall in love with a beautiful equation, and entirely lose track of what they were trying to do in the first place. Statistical analysis is a cruel and deceptive mistress, and it takes a very special kind of mind to avoid her illusions. A mind that is quite able to step back from the numbers and deal with things qualitative as well as quantitative, and thus avoid the problems of both.

For me, a great example of this is Freud. Yes, Freud got a lot of things wrong and he’s all “debunked” now, but his main contribution to psychology was not his theories, it was the very idea of the mind itself.

In Freud’s era, it was the empiricists who were dominant and to them, his theories, and the very idea that you can heal someone just my talking to them, were roundly ridiculed as superstitious nonsense by hard science bigwigs of his era.

What, was there something magical that passed through the air from the therapists lips into the brain of the patient? Everything had a physical cause, everybody knew that. All this nonsense about talk therapy was just a bunch of religious superstition wrapped up in scientific terms. And just where was this “subconscious mind” Freud was on about? None of it could be verified empirically, and so it’s all a lot of nonsense and we should stick to what we can prove.

Freud replied to his critics that the “proof” of his ideas was in his reasoning. You either examined his ideas and found them sound or found them wanting. Otherwise, the help he gave to others in making them happier was all the proof he needed.

Talk about quantitative versus qualitative! Personally, I think limiting yourself to one or the other is ridiculous. I am a passionate pragmatist and that means I use whatever tool works, regardless of its provenance. To me, it is cheap and weak and quite pathetic to pretend that the half of the issue that you don’t like is somehow flawed and suspect and that therefore you can feel free to ignore it and concentrate on the side that comes naturally to you.

I am quite comfortable with both sides. I am driven to find answers and solutions, and I will use whatever tool produces effective and reliable results.

Because I am all about the results, baby. That’s what pragmatism is all about. Whatever WORKS.

So I have equal contempt for the people who ignore evidence as I do for those who ignore relationships. Some questions have no quantitative answer, others no qualitative. They are not that kind of question, and to pretend that science and knowledge must limit itself to that which can be counted is just as bad as pretending that all questions are unanswerable and the numbers and data do not count.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you are good at and what you are not. That is fine. There is no royal road to becoming equally good at both. Nobody gets to be good at everything.

But to pretend that the things you aren’t good at are somehow inferior to the ones you are good at is the worst kind of provincial, small minded “sour grapes” thinking.

The proper response, if presented with a question from your non-dominant side is “I’m sorry, I don’t know, someone else will have to come up with that answer. ”

It is NOT “What a stupid question. I shouldn’t have to answer that kind of question. Besides, that stuff’s all stupid anyhow!”

Grow up, and take a look at the full picture.

That’s it from me for today, folks. Talk to you tomorrow!

Either assumption

Dear Extroverted People,

I’m an introvert. But amongst introverts, I’m a bit of an extrovert, so I thought I would take it upon myself to address you and try, in my own way, to bridge the gap.

I know you don’t understand us. Not really. You have to take it on faith that we are how we are, so very different from you, and accept that we live by different rules and have different needs, and we greatly appreciate the consideration you give us in that respect because we know you can’t truly identify with it.

And I know that when you do try to understand introversion, it seems kind of awful to you. It seems like there is something wrong with us, that we are sad people afraid of life, and part of you wants to cheer us up and gets us to come out of our shell.

And the truth is, some of us could really stand to be brought out of ourselves a little. But it can’t be done by force. You can’t drag us out into the light because we will just scurry back into our comforting darkness and cling to it all the harder in the future, and never trust you again because you are not “safe”.

To us, it is a loud, bright, upsetting world, and we treasure our retreats from the noise and hustle because it is only when we can escape overstimulation (and our comfortable stimulation level is much lower than yours) that we can be calm, relax, and recharge our social batteries by drawing strength from our highly developed interior lives.

It is those interior lives that let us understand you a little better than you understand us. We can understand, at least in the abstract, how you thrive on stimulation and excitement, and take your strength from the world instead of your own inner resources. You don’t have batteries that need recharging when they are spent. You take your energy directly from the environment, like a solar calculator, so you naturally seek environments full of energy and stimulation where you feel alive and happy. It makes total sense from your point of view.

But we don’t work that way. I know that it is hard for you to understand, but we can be perfectly happy alone with a book. We are not lonely and sad. We sincerely enjoy being alone because that is when we feel calm and safe. If you give us the space and time to recharge, and thus let us feel safe around you, you will find we can come out of our shells and be sociable with you and you will reap the rewards of connecting with a thoughtful, intelligent person with a point of view quite different from your own that can be a source of much interesting conversation, not to mention our emotional depth.

The trick is, you have to be very patient with us, and I know that is not easy for you. We are not very stimulating to be around when we don’t feel safe, and so it is hard for you to be patient and not give into your frustration with us. You normally avoid low stimulation situations because they make you depressed and it can be very tempting to just give up on us and go seek a more stimulating companion.

And that’s fine. Nobody said you were morally obligated to draw us out. It is up to you to decide if you are interested enough to take the time to get to know us. If you do not, we will just go back to our happy internal lives.

But if you take the time, we can do each other a lot of good. Us introverts can gain much wisdom on how to embrace live and live in the moment from people like you. You seem so very alive to us that we often envy your freedom of self-expression.

Of course, other times you scare the hell out of us.

No, really. If you remember, we prefer quiet environments because that is where we feel relaxed and calm, so you can imagine what high stimulus environments (or people) does to us. We get very anxious and freaked out, and all we want is to run back to our quiet caves as fast as we can.

So if we seem scared of you, try not to take it too personally. When we don’t feel safe, we can’t view things rationally and sometimes that means we are not being fair to you. We are reacting like the scared animals we are, and we can’t calm down and view things in a more rational, sober light until the fear stimulus (you) is gone.

Therefore, your usual instinct, to just go at a problem until you solve it, is not going to work. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the correct strategy. You need to just leave us alone for a while, and wait for us to come out of our fear state and maybe even emerge, ever so cautiously, from our caves on our own.

What happens next is vital. You have to make it safe for us to approach you, and build up that trust slowly. We only trust a little at a time, and at any moment we could bolt back into our holes, and so we’re sorry if it seems like we are testing you.

We are, in fact, testing you. Sorry. But it can’t be helped.

So just keep it mellow, and if you pay careful attention, we will give you clues as to the level of stimulation we are ready for. The basic rule is, don’t give back more stimulation than we give you. As we open up and relax, we will naturally raise our output bit by bit until we reach our higher comfort level.

And that is when both extroverts and introverts can get along great together, two halves of the same whole, and we are far stronger together than the sum of all our strengths apart.

That’s all for today folks…. see you later!

Another thing that came up during yesterday’s therapy session is my intensity.

It is another facet of my struggle to understanf just what sort of effect I have on people. I have been lost in the cave of echoes for so long that I just don’t know what my true reflection even looks like any more.

I need to replace the false image I hated for so many years with something more balanced and true.

And part of that larger mission is my effort to make sense of my childhood. It is not news to anyone that I was a very diffifult child. All those brains and sensitivity, without the slightest clue how to be tactful and thus avoid biting the hand that feeds me. Willful and extremely stubborn, effortlessly indepedent of mind and will and hopelessly and patheticly dependent on my teachers for attention, extremely different yet desperate to be liked, to say that I was a handful would be a profound understatement,

I was an entire round of applause-ful.

What I realized yesterday is that I was not just a difficult kid, I was UNIQUELY difficult. In all regards, I was simply off the scale of what most non-specialy teachers could handle. I had the bad luck to be a four dimensional peg in a three diensional hole, and I cannot get too mad about the system just plain not being able to handle me.

Sure, in a perfect world, every school system would be able to handle any student, no matter how unique. But here in the real world, systems are designednbsp; to work for the largest number of people possible, and that is always the middle of the bell curve, not the outliers.

And I am an outlier amongst outliers.

From the point of the view of my teachers and family, I was very difficult to deal with, and very easy to ignore, Dealing with me meant fielding my way out of left field questions, dealing with my obvious kicked-dog neediness, and enduring the high wattage spotlight of my attention.

That last bit is what I mean by my intensity. The thing about being very bright is that you are hard on the eyes. Dealing with you is like looking directly at a lit lightbulb, especially for people of normal intelligence.

Whereas ignoring you not only spares people all that, but also incurs no penalty. It is not like by ignoring you, people have to deal with you acting out, or pestering for attention, or anything else.

And all it takes is the slightest hint of rejection, and I will go away and stop bothering you. It is the ultimate in convenience. A self-disposing child.

I was hard to take but easy to ignore.

Explains a lot, really.

See you tomorrow, folks.

Yesterday I talked about the classroom effect (as named by dear Felicity) which causes those of us of a nerdish hue to respond to any question as though we were in an oral exam and would be graded on the accuracy and the thoroughness of our answers.

But there is another factor that causes us nerds to fail to know when to lie, or when to simply be gentle for that matter, and that is our lack of social empathy.

Recognizing the moments when you should probably not be totally blunt takes an understanding of others and their situation that is often lacking in us nerdly types. It is not that we are malicious or callous or cruel (usually), although that is how we appear to others sometimes.

It’s just that the information we need comes from the social empathy circuit of our brains. We have to open our hearts to the feelings of others and do our best to truly understand their situation from their point of view.

This ability is sometimes referred to as theory of mind, which it is, but being of a more poetic bent I would prefer to call it theory of heart.

I call it that to distinguish it from the cold, analytical, objective kind of understanding of others that is a product of the intellect more than our empathy and which can often seem like empathy because it yields a very powerful and insightful form of analysis that can easily pass for a true understanding of one’s fellow humans.

But that is not the same as empathy, because empathy is emotional, not rational. Cold analysis might lead you to think you understand people, but only via opening your heart to others and feeling what they feel can you truly understand what another person is going through and why.

And we nerds are very bad at opening our hearts. We have highly energetic and curious minds which are ready to embrace all kinds of novel ideas, but our hearts tend to be closed tight and riveted shut. Bullying is partly to blame, but a lot of it comes simply from having a mind that is very good at the sort of symbolic logic and abstract thinking skills that are valued by the modern education system.

Our minds are powerful tools, and like all powerful tools, it tends to overwhelm one’s other gifts and become one’s primary way of dealing with the world. Being bright and mentally agile allows one to produce very convincing simulations of things like wisdom and emotional growth, but without social empathy’s input, the same input that is vital in the psychosocial development of average people, the real person behind all that mental horsepower gets lost in the maze of their own mind.

So nerds are excessively blunt and socially tone-deaf partly because of the classroom mentality, but also because they have grown up using their big brains for everything, and that is great for being smart but not so great for being sensitive, socially intelligent, or for that matter, happy.

Now that we have established the problem, we must ask if there is any solution. And perhaps this comes purely from a certain sort of native optimism, but I think there is.

Call it empathy training. We are lucky in that unless one is actually autistic, all the hardware for active empathy is still right there and working fine, we nerds have just been ignoring the signals from it and considering it noise that interferes with our mentation and “objectivity”.

The first step is to fully and completely accept other people’s right to be completely different from you. This is no mere intellectual act of rationally deciding that pluralism is best for all concerned.

You must give these people full permission to be unlike you. That means you can no longer consider “normal” people to be stupid, or defective, or weak, or a bunch of mindless sheeple, or any of that.

It will not be easy to surrender these judgments because we nerds use them as a shield against the normal world, a way of keeping ourselves separate from those that we have all too often learned to think of as “the enemy”.

To lower our shields, then, is to let these people in, where they can hurt us again. I know how hard that is. I am still working on it myself. But in order to make use of your empathetic powers, you will have to lower your mental defenses at least some of the time.

After all, your social antennae are useless if you keep them in an emotional Faraday cage.

Once you have emotionally decloaked, the next step is to learn to accept and truly believe the following precept : every action by every human being makes sense from their point of view.

Human beings are not random, unpredictable, arbitrary, or completely irrational. Even a psychotically insane person in the midst of a severe break from reality is doing what makes sense to them according to what they are experiencing.

when you think about it, this is logically obvious. Some humans are perfectly capable of understanding and predicting the behaviour of others. Therefore, it cannot be random or arbitrary. There must be a form of order to it, otherwise we would have to posit the existence of magic in order to explain this ability.

And you know, Occam’s Razor.

Once you accept that other people are valid and it is possible to understand them, you are ready to truly open your heart to others and finally start picking up the social signal you have been treating as noise for so long.

And who knows, once you do that, you might even begin to understand and forgive your own emotional nature, and forge a better connection not just with others but with yourself.

And that can only lead to greater understanding, emotional health, and happiness for the rest of your life.

And what could be more logical than that?

Remember, you can’t live your life like you’re not personally involved!

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

I think I am adjusting to the new way my brain works.

This freshly reintegrated brain of mine is taking some getting used to. Everything is so much denser and richer now. Emotions are stronger, intuition is deeper, thoughts move in strange new ways.

It’s like a whole new brain in here.

Take memory. On the one hand, remembering things takes more effort than before. It often feels like I have t drag the memory out of thick mud. No surprise for a 40 year old man in imperfect health, but still kinda depressing. My quick and capacious memory was the main thing that made school so easy for me.

I just remembered what I was taught.

On the other hand, I have been remembering things BETTER than before. I have never had the sort of encyclic memory that remembers a lot of names and dates and such. My roomies Joe and Felicity do, and I am always amazed and pleased by how much information they can summon at a moment’s notice. We will be watching some obscure video and they will see an actor’s name and instantly remember all their other roles like they were the IMDB.==

To me, that’s like a magic trick. It’s all I can do not to clap.

But lately, I seem to be growing a facility like theirs, in miniature. I am increasingly able to correlate my memories like that. I remembered where I knew Richard Benjamin from (short lived sci fi comedy Quark) just from seeing him in an episode of Mad About You a few days ago.

Who knows, maybe i can learn history properly now. Or even geography!

So while remembering is harder, the results are better. Makes sense. The better process just takes more effort than the previous one with the big blind spots.

As to my tendency to zone out at literally any possible moment, I am adjusting to that as well. The secret is not to fight the inward current directly, for only a fool fights the incoming tide. Instead, you have to dance with it, letting it push you in then pushing back out when it ebbs.

I am sure you have all been through the exact same thing.

So I am learning to dance to a brand new beat now. But I am not too worried. The beat has changed, but the song remains the same.

And i am determined to find my happiness, even if I have to knock down the doors of Heaven to do it.

I’d rather it didn’t come to that, but still.

So here I am in White Spot, writing on the tablet in the space between my therapist appointment and one with my GP.

Just overheard : “Triple O sauce all pver my face…”

I don’t have a lot of time, so most of this will likely be written elsewhere. Right now, I am just waiting for the check. I have around ten minutes before my GP appointment.

Not that he rewards punctuality,He is constantly and reliably running late. My appointment is at 12:45, and a voice in my head says that I should just take my time and show up at 1 or something.

But for me, punctuality is compulsive (compunctual?) and so I have no choice but to try to be on time for things, regardless of the fidelity of my counterpart.

Still, if I am a minute or two late, I will do my best to not give a fuck.

Therapy was good. I feel great forces moving in the shadows of my mind. It makes me feel a little spooked out, even hau ted. It is like a great wind is rising within me to presage a mighty storm.

I am kind of looking forward to the storm. Maybe it will cure this terrible ache inside me, like a toothache of the soul.

Some time=”time” later=”later”/Some

Okay, now I am waiting n my GP’s office for Dog knows how long.

It is not just an ache. It is a deep longing, a yearning that makes me feel like I am a plant desperately leaning towards the only light around, as feeble and lifeless as that life is.

Why is my star so cold?

I feel like I am heading into a period of serious healing. I feel more cohesive and whole than before, but the healing cannot complete until some very big injuries are cleansed and healed. Until then, the wound cannot close and I cannot be whole again.

But it is not something I can do consciously or deliberately. That’s the rub. I cannot just tackle the problem with my mighty mental muscles and solve it. It is not that kind of problem.

And I am nog used to that. I am used to problems I can solve via analysis. In its arrogance, that mighty and ferocious barbarian that is my mind tends to assume it can beat all comers.

But this is a problem without substance, and neither warrior nor wizard can stand against it.

Only the oft-maligned mystic can travel the roads to where the madness grows, and seek the key to its undoing.

Only the mystic has the knowledge and sensitivity to understand the pain that drives the madness to extremes, and the compassion to strive to ease that pain, and free the beast.

I have never trusted my mystical side before, being all rational and logical and stuff.

But Fruvous the mystic might be the only one who can save all the rest.

All I need is a little faith.

But faith is for the ignorant . Real men use knowledge, or do without… right?

And the poet laughs.

Originally, I was going to talk about the shit going down in the Ukraine today, but I am too upset.

Sufficeth to say, I am super fucking angry at Putin and Russia right now. IMPERIALISM IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.

Instead of getting all worked up about that, I will instead talk about the perils of the magnifying glass and the importance of a solid grounding in proportion and perspective.

See, all us naked beach apes have a magnifying glass in our cognitive toolkit. It is a very important tool as it lets us focus down on small details and deal with them. Without it, we would stumble around like someone trying to walk down a busy urban street while looking through two telescopes.

But as vital a tool as it is, it can also lead to our ruination because it is all too easy to focus in tightly on some small detail then forget we used the magnifying glass at all.

Thus, the small seems big, we lose all sense of perspective, and we live in fear (or awe) of things that, in reality, are smaller than an ant’s appetite.

We do this for various reasons. One of the main ones is that by focusing strongly on something we know, deep down, is not all that big a deal, we push everything else out of our vision and make our worlds smaller and more manageable, without the always stressful and perilous high level cognitive task of maintaining perspective.

The big picture, after all, contains many very scary and overwhelming things like our own mortality, the fact that we are one drop of humanity in a sea of seven billion, the basic arbitrary and unfeeling nature of the universe, and so forth.

All of those are enormous challenges with many complexities, variables, and terrifying possibilities (what if I got sick right now? Who would take care of things? What would happen to my children?) and so it is far easier and a good deal more soothing to focus on something small and manageable and let that fill your mind and become your world.

And that works great… in the short term. But in the long term, you forget that you are just pretending that the little picture is the real world, and that tiny world takes over your mind.

And what once seemed small and manageable suddenly looms as large and frightening as the real world did, with the added disadvantage that, because the small world is just a tiny section of the large, it actually fluctuates and changes wildly compared to the big world, and for reasons that you cannot comprehend from your narrow perspective.

Imagine that person walking around with telescopes tied to their eyes. The slightest motion of their heads, and what they are seeing will veer wildly over a huge arc of vision. Their only chance to make sense of their fixed perspective would be to stay as absolutely still as they possibly can.

And that is what a lot of people end up doing. They live motionless lives of stasis and immobility purely because they have those telescopes over their eyes and everything changes too fast when they move. If they could just remember that those telescopes are there, they could just reach up and take them off and go back to the real world again.

But they signed a deal with the Devil when they forgot about their self-induced visual impairment. They have lost their ability to switch perspectives to whichever one suits the moment. And most importantly, they have lost the ability to maintain a three dimensional view of the world, one informed by many points of view but fixed to none.

This people end up dominated by fears which seem enormous only because the mind has focused on them and which therefore block the rest of the frame, and rob us of the cues to the true size of what we are seeing.

Thus, the elephant is menaced by the ant, and the greatest of minds are trapped by the smallest of pitfalls.

The only cure is perspective. Look around at the wider world with open and innocent eyes. Give up all your filters. Filters lie. Try to see the world through the eyes of a child. Learn to ask yourself, “But how much does this matter, really?”

Also remember that this works in reverse as well. A flip of the telescope and very important things can be made to seem very small, and thus ease your fears. A lot of potentially very big and scary tigers can be seen as tiny frisky kittens when you throw perspective out of the window.

Thus, you get the person who plays World of Warcraft all the time and takes the game incredibly seriously, learning enormous amounts of its lore and arcana and devoting their entire lives to it, while completely forgetting about things like rent, bills, and personal hygiene.

Because really, what are the petty mundane concerns of the mortal realm compared to the power and glory of the Horde?

But like it or not, you remain in the real world with its limits and restrictions and sadness no matter how hard you work at disappearing into the world of fantasy and the imagination.

Reality always wins.

Therefore, maintain perspective. Use that excellent mind to serve your real world purposes. Take the skills you use to plan a raid, and plan your life.

Life is not a game, but it does have rules, and so treating it as a game can be just what the doctor ordered to bridge the gap between the safe world of make believe and the unsafe world of larger reality.

Especially if you play to win. That will keep you focused on the real picture and not on some picture you drew in your head and pasted it over the lens of your mind.

The real world has real problems, true. But it also has the only real solutions.

And to recap, Vlad Putin, GRR.

Sorry, Bear, but I got idea to blog.

I have been getting into podcasting lately, having added a “podcatcher” (what a cute name!) to the many apps on my tablet. And one of the first things I did was get caught up on the Cracked.com podcast.

It’s an excellent podcast, BTW. Smart funny people talking about really interesting topics. To me, that’s heaven.

Recently, I was listening to an episode about moral panics (one of my fave subjects… double heaven!), and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

Things like horror movies, McCarthyism, and the Salem witch trials.

And it all leads me to the question in the title of this entry : Do we have a need for something to fear? Every society ever has made up scary stories to frighten themselves. The impulse that drives horror fans to the theaters is universal. We definitely have the capacity to enjoy being scared.

But I think it goes deeper than that. As you all know by now, I am big believer in catharsis, and when you think about it, modern society produces a steady stream of small scares that must accumulate in our fight or flight or hide centers just waiting for a trigger event for them to crystallize upon.

Of course, most of these small frights aren’t of the saber toothed tiger variety. If they were, we would get our stimulation and our catharsis all in one neatly packaged event, assuming we survived.

No, our fears are more swift and subtle than that. We experience and stifle fears so efficiently that we often have no idea we are doing it. Little frights, like feeling a moment of fear as the elevator starts moving, or the fear that comes when you are crossing a busy street, or even the constantly low level fear that comes from driving.

So it seems entirely possible to me that fear builds up in our blood just like anger does (hence outrage addiction) and the more sophisticated and civilized the culture, the less chance there is to vent that latent fear.

Anger is easy. Go smash the hell out the ball in a racquetball court. Argue over politics on some Internet message board. If you are very rustic, go chop wood.

But fear? What, besides horror fiction, in our modern world lets us vent fear?

I mean, what would that even look like? A gym where a scary guy with a knife chases you? A new form of exercise that involves a lot of running, screaming, and hiding? Primal scream therapy?

So we have no conscious way to vent our accumulated fears. That means the only outlets for them are subconscious, and that brings me to the subject of moral panics.

For those who don’t know, a moral panic is a specific fear that takes hold in a society which spreads very quickly, becomes a solid belief for thousands or even millions of people, and then fades as the panic ends and reality returns and people realize that they have gotten caught up in something which is patently silly when viewed in the clear light of day.

And this is not just rubes and rednecks. Even the smartest people in society get caught up in these things. It is a very difficult thing to go the opposite way as the herd when there’s a stampede.

A classic example is the McCarthy hearings, and the whole Red Scare in general. In a time of unprecedented peace, order, safety, and prosperity, the collective unconscious of the American people invented the sneaky commies under every bed who wanted nothing more than to turn your kids into Communists.

Viewed from this era, it seems patently obvious that these seemingly all-powerful, infinitely sneaky and underhanded, omnipresent Commies were only slightly more rational than a nationwide panic over ghosts.

Yet everyone, from the simplest farmer to the most learned professor, believed in those magic Commies at the time. Why?

Because people need something to fear. These moral panics give people the catharsis they need, and we become very, very attached to that which affords us catharsis, especially if it a release of emotions we don’t even know we have.

So moral panics sweep through cultures like wildfires, doomed to be a historical embarrassment at best, and an inhuman atrocity at the worst.

The Nazis owed their rise to a moral crisis about Jews, after all.

This also explains the popularity of conspiracy theories. They form a full and rich worldview that is thrillingly filled with danger and villainy, and all made up of seemingly plausible precepts.

The one thing we cannot seem to accept is that we are perfectly safe and everything is, actually, fine. The truth is that this world of ours has never been better. This is the safest, sanest, most humane, most prosperous, most ideal era there has ever been, and things just keep getting better.

But that provides no catharsis, so we go on thinking the world is going to hell, that surely this is the worst things have ever been, that ruin is nigh and crime runs rampant in the streets and we are all lucky to be alive.

The facts simply do not fit that view. But we prefer the scary world because it echoes, expresses, and reinforces our own fears while making our everyday, boring, safe lives seem a lot more exciting and dramatic, and all while actually remaining perfectly safe in our modern urban lives.

Put simply, we prefer to think the world is a horror show. And if reality does not provide sufficient fun, we simply make up demons and villains and then act exactly as if they were real.

And the modern era is not immune. The media confects a new moral panic every day. Fear drives ratings, after all. and people just love freaking out over things which do not even exist, like vodka eyeballing or butt chugging or rainbow parties.

The solution, I think, begins with bringing our fears to the surface. We need to all acknowledge that we all have fear, just like we had to acknowledge that we all have lust.

Only then can we begin to build the social machinery necessary to give these fears a conscious, voluntary, socially approved way of venting those fears before they build up to a point where they make us crazy and rob us of our ability to rationally assess threats and to enjoy the peace and wonder of the real, modern world.

Plus, it would make it way harder for politicians to manipulate us.

Think about it.