I made good on my threat to do more sci fi bitching, although I quickly wandered into a more philosophical and/or psychological territory.
Call it “theory of human behaviour”, I guess. For me, it’s all one fascinating subject.
That’s why, had my college education gone as intended, I would have graduated with a double major, psychology and philosophy, unless that goddamned registrar got pissy with me again and decided double majors weren’t allowed even though I would have finished with all the necessary course credits for both.
God, did I hate that prick.
Anyhow, in that case I would have finished with a major in psych and a minor in philosophy, because while I love philosophy, there’s not a lot of jobs in it.
Never major in something where the only job that major qualifies you is teaching the subject as a professor, kids, unless you think you’re insanely driven and competitive enough to beat all the other people with dumb degrees for those prized associate professor/glorified flunkie positions.
Anyhow, here’s the vid :
I am quite serious about the ultimate supremacy of emotion, of course. Despite being a highly intellectual individual who loves science and heavily favours things like logical analysis, advanced deduction, and reductive insight, I am not some silly German logic fetishist who not only think it’s possible to remove emotion from our reasoning entirely but for some bizarre reason thinks that would be a good thing.
Like I said in the vid, all motives are emotional, and no human action is without motive, whether your motive is to advance peace and justice for all humanity or to finally dislodge that stubborn burp, and so all human action is emotional. QED.
Indeed, take it from someone who has “been there”, worshipping some form of logic is actually a purely emotional attempt to retreat from reality into a world of nice clean comfortable abstractions where the excessively intellectual feel more safe.
What’s worse is that it’s also an attempt to dodge accountability for one’s actions. Oh, I didn’t decide to do this thing, it was the only logical course of action. And you can’t argue against that unless you can argue against their logic, and they have usually made that difficult by hiding their true motives in things like grey areas and verbal ambiguities and are generally better at that sort of arguing that the average non-intellectual.
It’s what makes certain kinds of people really fucking irritating.
But clearly that’s all bullshit. You did that thing because you felt like it. Ultimately. Your attempt at intellectual camouflage is understandable but it is truly dangerous to lie to yourself like that and tell yourself you are logical when you’re just as emotional as the rest of it, you’re just in much, much deeper denial and even further alienated from yourself and who you really are.
And that’s bad.
I am only just now learning to untangle all this complicated emotional spaghetti code myself. I feel like I am lost in a virtual realm of my own design and part of me suspects that deep down, I know what’s real and what’s mere illusion, but I am too emotionally dependent on the illusions to cast the spell that will make it all go away.
Because then where would I be? Stuck in the real world, without my primary defense of retreating into my mind? How can that be a good thing?
For me, that would mean casting myself into the yawning maw of the unknown, and I am neurotic enough to feel like unknown automatically means bad,
And I know that is cowardly of me. I have no apparent spirit of adventure and exploration. My default is to assume that only the known can be safe and the darkness outside the bright cold light of my intellect is filled with ghosts and ghouls and goblins hell bent on destroying me utterly.
When in truth, they probably don’t even know who I am.
More after the break.
The fear in your soul
Fear doesn’t have to control a person, though. History is full of brave people who did very scary things. Ordinary, mentally well people overcome themselves every day to go out there and take on that world.
They don’t live like they are strapped in place in front of a computer and forbidden to do anything but play video games and make videos and write on their blog under penalty of being buried alive, for fuck’s sake.
So why does my fear control me? Why can’t I just push back and do whatever the hell I want to do regardless of my fears?
Where did my courage go?
I’ve got to fall back on my way too easy (in some ways) childhood.
School was nothing to me. I never even learned to study. And I think this means I never learned to overcome my own limitations and I never learned to subdue my fears.
And life didn’t force me to learn any of that either. I have always had people to hide behind. People who take care of me and handle reality for me. I lived on my own when I first moved to the GVRD and got on welfare, so it’s not like I have never ever lived on my own, and I of course managed it just fine because it’s not that hard.
Pay the rent. Shop for groceries. Pay the bills. Simple.
But since then, I’ve had roommates to take care of things for me. There was Steve, and Eamon, and Angela, and of course now Joe and Julian.
And I suppose they didn’t necessarily do all that much for me. I still did my own laundry and cleaning and cooking and shopping.
So I get the feeling that perhaps the idea of my being pathetically dependent on others is another plank of my negative internal narrative that has to go.
Piece by piece, I’mma take that god damned thing apart.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.