Been pondering subjectivity and people’s relationship to it. Specifically, people who can’t accept their own subjectivity and insist that the world is exactly as they perceive it no matter how blatantly absurd their perceptions are.

I have an example. It’s a comedy bit I wrote in my head a long time ago.

Felicity. I know you don’t like this bit, so feel free to skip it.

“Oh yeah Grandpa. That has to be it. At some point, absolutely everyone in the world – including people in Australia and everybody on TV – started mumbling. That is definitely the only possible explanation. Somehow, the world, as one, united , and, as species no less, we all decided to start mumbling. You were the only one left out of that historically unprecented meeting of all the minds on Earth. Oh – and we did it just to annoy you, too. I mean, why else would we do it? A seamless global conspiracy is the only possible explanation. It certainly can’t be that you’re losing your hearing. ”

Man, that comes off as dickish. It’s a good thing I have never actually used it in anything,. Typed out like that, I just want to punch the speaker in the face.

Let your Grandpa have his comforting delusions, god damn it!

Anyhow, you get the idea. Some people simply cannot (or will not) accept the truth of their own subjectivity. They will insist, to their dying day, that everything has always been exactly as they perceived it, without any need to check their perceptions for logic or likelihood or even internal consistency.

And there is a word for what they lack : metaconsciousness.

You need a fairly good metaconscious mind to be able to examine your perceptions of reality for potential flaws. One definition of the metaconscious is that it is the part of the mind that thinks about what it’s thinking.

It’s the part of the mind that spots logic flaws. And I am not just talking about some abstruse intellectual kind of logic flaws.

I am talking about the simple perception of things just plain not adding up.

And anyone can get that feeling. So when I talk of the metaconscious mind, I am not talking about something that some people have and others don’t.

We all have one. We would not be able to maintain the internal integrity of our minds without one. The very data structures of the human mind would fall apart.

However, some people’s metascious minds are much stronger, and operate on a higher level, than other people’s.

And I am afraid that it correlates with intelligence. We have the level of metaconsciousness that we can handle, more or less.

This causes a lot of conflict between people on different levels of metaconsciousness. To the person on the higher level, the flaws in the reasoning of people on a lower level are glaringly obvious and they can’t believe they even have to explain them.

For the lower level person, the higher level person’s critiques can’t help but feel like a very dangerous personal attack that they absolutely must defend against with all their being because when you challenge someone’s perceptions, you are challenging the very foundation of their consciousness, and that…. hurts.

It is quite possible that if they accepting the higher perceptive person’s logic. it would send them into a deep existential quandy which they have no way to understand and no faith in their ability to escape.

That’s why people like that hate us liberal intellectual types and think we are out to destroy everything they love and care about.

On this specific level, we are. We question their deepest beliefs and are then surprised when they fight back with great rage and vigor. We can’t imagine why they are so mad because, after all, we can change our beliefs based on new evidence.

Or so we think, anyhow.

But that’s easy for us to say because we have that higher level of metaconsciousness that allows for such shifts in belief. Others do not. So we have no idea how the average person would pay a much higher price than we would to update their beliefs.

We know not what we ask of them, nor do we know what harm we do by asking.

Myself, I have always grasped the limits of my own perceptions. That hardly makes infallible, but it does give me a higher level of metaconsciousness that most people.

After all, I’m a genius.

And so I am often frustrated by what to me are the obvious deficiencies in the thinking of most people. This frustation could have easily turned me into a standard bitter and misanthropic intellectual who rails against how stupid people are in a cunning move designed to make my own social deficiencies everyone else’s fault.

Obviously, I did not go that route. Lots of my fellow intellectuals do. It is a natural and understandable response given how badly life often treats us smart but socially awkward types and how that makes us seek refuge in misanthropy.

But it’s not for me. I know that it is me that is broken, not them, and that it’s not that they are idiots but that I am a genius.

And perhaps that is my higher level of metaconsciousness at work. I can see misanthropy for the spiritual dead end it is, and thus avoid it.

And maybe, from a mystic’s point of view, that means I am on a higher spiritual plane than most of humanity.

All I can say about that is : it’s so cold up here. I wish I could be down there with the common folks, mingling with them, and sharing their warmth.

But I am not like them, and I will never be one of them.

So I watch from afar, and dream.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.