Pop quiz, kiddies. Today’s blog entry comes with homework.

Go read this article.

And don’t give me any of that TL;DR crap. If you can read my daily 1K, you can read a long twitter thread.

Done? Good. You may take one cookie from the jar.

Now was that not amazing (the article, not the cookie)?In it, Sarah Silverman demonstrates the exact kind of superior morality that I deeply respect and consider to be downright holy.

It’s all about being able to see past the immediate situation and what all our instincts are telling us to do – namely to meet anger with anger and struggle for dominance with those who attack us.

That’s why “The Devil in the Dark” is my all time favorite Star Trek episode of all time. In it, Kirk sees beyond the very human desire to kill any animal which threatens us and looks at the larger picture, asking himself why this creature is attacking people and what might be the larger problem.

And make no mistake, the Horta is freaking terrifying.  Kirk could have gone in there, phasers blasting, and killed the fuck out of the Horta, and been hailed as a hero.

But that wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted to understand the real story and did not fall into the “us versus the monster” mentality that the miners (and me, the first time I saw the episode) so naturally fall into.

I am serious. I wanted him to kill that fucking thing. So imagine the impact when I first saw “NO KILL I”.

Blew my mind.

Anyhow, back to Sarah. I am particularly impressed by her compassionate response because she is clearly in the socially dominant position. She’s rich and famous and her opponent is poor and miserable and fucked up in the head.

I feel ya, bro.

So she totally could have said something scathing and mean and the Internet would have loved her for it if it was funny enough. When we like a celebrity, we think it only fair and just that those that oppose them learn the error of their ways.

That’s what they get for messing with our beloved alpha! High 5’s!

But instead, she chose to ignore the hate and look into what would make a person lash out at a celebrity and was rewarded by seeing things as they truly are, with context attached, and instead of continuing the cycle of violence begetting violence, she held out a hand to the ghost that haunts her and found that even the villains have souls and lives and feelings and reasons for doing the things they do.

This is not the natural way people see things. It can bring up strange and difficult conflicts in our minds as we struggle to overcome our instincts in order to help someone we already hate because of their anger towards us.

That’s why I feel the need to emphasize that this superior morality is always a choice and never an obligation. It’s the extraordinary outlier and thus can never become the expected mandatory minimum.

And like all striving towards higher morality, it is just as much about improving oneself as it is about improving the world. When we stretch our souls towards higher moral ground, we end up feeling better about ourselves in the process. We can sense we have made our souls bigger, stronger, and more pure by this striving, and so even on a deep gut level, we feel more whole, more sane, more free.

Much of this message gets garbled, lost, or downright contradicted by modern religion. They try to make this superior compassion mandatory, thus poisoning the whole process and turning compassion into a battle of wills instead of a source of joy.

Now you know where most of this “you can’t make me share!” sentiment comes from.

The proper approach is to preach the joy of selfless action and tell people, in detail, and with true understanding, how compassionate action can lead to salvation in the here and now by taking us out of our everyday lives and self-oriented concerns and lets us breathe fresh air above the usual pollution and stagnancy of everyday life.

We do such a poor job of explaining this to people in modern life. Spirituality is about what is good for the spirit, not what people “ought” to do. That is a hard idea to get across in this materialistic individualist age, and it often gets tangled up in the errors and excesses of various well-intended religions.

There is a bulletproof case for the selfish benefits of selfless action sitting there in the religious literature, and yet nobody seems to be making it. Instead, we have this poisonous dichotomy between spirituality (which sucks and is not fun) and people’s natural inclination to enjoy themselves.

In reality, there is no such conflict. Doing good feels good, and that’s really the only rational enlightened hedonist argument that needs to be made. Even if you are one hundrent percent selfish sociopath, you should look into the benefits of helping others because in doing so, you end up happier and better off for the effort.

It’s programmed into us. Being social animals, we get pleasure from actions which benefit members of our tribe and/or the tribe itself.

Personally, I find the very idea of an entirely self-oriented life to be positively stifling. To be trapped in that tiny box of your own self-interest seems like hell to me.

But then again, nobody has ever forced me to give up something I valued in the name of compassion. I have never been violated that way. It sounds horrible.

To have your person (via your property) violated by people claiming the higher moral ground due to “compassion”?

Yeah, that could give someone issues that last a lifetime. And a paranoid response to the word “compassion”, which is forever linked with sudden deprivation in your mind.

And all because “compassion” was forced upon someone who wanted to exercise their need for dominance and control from behind the cover given by religion.

How very selfish of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I keep endingup feeling really bad lately and I am sick of it.

Right now, I am in the “post bad sleep” version of feeling really shitty. I feel all floaty and dizzy and shallow waves of vertigo are passing through me constantly. As a result, I am weaving a little as I sit, and I feel like I am going to fall, or that I am already falling, or something like that anyhow.

That means I am also playing tag with reality. Or maybe pat-a-cake. I keep drifting off then patiently towing myself back into focus. It’s quite tedious and irritating.

Oh, and I am sick.

Specifically, have the cold type thing that my roomies Joe and Julian also have. That officially makes this a “sick house”, or masoin maleur, as we called it back home.

So right now, I have heavy lung and a runny nose. No doubt my near future will involve a lot of mucus. I am very tired (of course) and the urge to hibernate is incredibly strong,. But I am too stubborn to give in to it.

I want to live, god damn it, not sleep my life away.

The sensible thing for me to do, because it’s worked in the past, would be for me to simply induge the urge to sleep until I catch up with my dreaming backlog and can approach the world with something like true wakefulness, at least for a little while.

But I don’t wanna. I want to be awake and do things and live some kind of life. I might not have much of a life but I want to live it just the same. The idea of spending all day asleep, even if it is jus for one day and for completely sensible and intelligent reasons, is appalling to me. I don’t want to get left behind by time.

So I fight it.

That makes even less sense than usual when I know damned well that I am sick. What do people tell sick people to do? Get plenty of fluids and plenty of rest.

Those two things always seem contradictory to me, because if you are getting plenty of fluids, your rest will be interrupted by getting up to go pee all the damned time.

Take it from one who knows.

But anyhow, clearly, the sensible thing to do when you are sick is to sleep as much as your body wants you to sleep. That way,m your body can fight the virus or whatever without your conscious mind around to divert precious resources into things like thinking and moving and such.

But still, I fight it.

I fight it like some prize fighter who has taken too many hits to the head this bout and is half-blind and staggering around the ring punching anything that looks like his opponent and really should just go down and stay down but the part of the brain responsible for such decisions left early to beat the traffic.

And there’s no ref around to declare a TKO. In fact, my opponent left too. It’s just me fighting the ghosts in my head in an empy boxing ring in an empty stadium, the lights turned off exscept for the ones in the ring.

It’s all very arty.

Well I am gonna hit the mat for a while, I will finish here when I get back up.

I feel a little better now.  Enough to get some more of my words out, anyhow.

Still not sure what to do about the Xbox One. I could sell it. I could use it. Both options have their ups and downs.

Maybe this is one of those times where I should just myself what I want to do about it. And the truth is that what I actuallt want to do is hook that sucker up. My inner chuild is quite excited at the idea of having an awesome new toy to play with, one that will let me finally be able to play the newest hotest games.

Then again, so does this PC of mine. It’s affordinf them that’s the tricky bit. I end up playing games that are at least four or five years old becauise those are the ones I can afford. New games are like $60-$80 and that is a bit too much for me,

Plus, with a price that high, eve n if I have the money, the option paralysis that comes with the higher financial stakes would be crippling.

I am such a mess.

But I am doing my best to banish such negative thoughts and build some kind of workable psyche for myself. And that’s made me start wondering about arrogance.

You see, I think one of my big problems when it comes to interacting with others is that I send mixecd messages. I pretend to be normal-ish and I am always polite and sensitive and nice and in that sense I am sending the message that I am harmless and nonthreatening, and therefore not particularly dominant or alpha.

At the same time, I have a quick, forceful, and powerful mind and a strong personality that constantly demands to be expressed. I am naturally a pretty pushy person due to this energy, and if I was less depressed, I think I would want to take charge a lot more than I do now, which is practically never.

That’s all quite alpha.

This mixed message confuses people and adds to the strange emotional affect that leaves me feeling like an alien whne people stare at me in blank incomprehension when I talk to them.

So I wonder if I would be better off just going with the side of me that it cocky and arrogant and thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world. It woulkd do wonders for my self-confidence, and it would send a clear message as to what to expect from me to the world. It would disinhibit me and give me access to assets like my charisma and force of personality and pursuasiveness.

And all that is really stopping me (besides mental illness) is fear of people thinking I am an obnoxious asshole.

There are worser fates.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.