We are All Lost in the Right Now; How identitarian thinking makes us lose ourselves

As one spends more time with much younger people, as I do now in classrooms every day, one begins to realize or remember a few things; none of them shocking or groundbreaking. They should be self-breaking. Self-breaking is, perhaps, the most unorthodox of ideas in a time of grasping a hold of your identity as if it were real.

Ok, let’s take a step back, metaphorically of course, as I know my readers like to take in my profundity while standing near abysses, both figurative and literal. Watch your step here.

It’s obvious to most people, at least, that as we see people around us making mistakes we have made in the past, we see fragments of, perhaps, our past selves. We see that we have grown in understanding, perspective, and also wisdom.

If only you could see, we say to ourselves. We want to reach out, as if to ourselves, and nudge them in some direction or other. We want to fix the problem. And, perhaps, in doing so we overlook an important insight.

Mistakes of the Past

If you are reading this, and even if you are not, you have fucked up. Maybe in small ways, maybe in lots of big ways, but you have. The egregiousness of the offense might add a separate dimension (if not several) to the complexity of my inevitable point, but for right now can we agree, dear (un)reader, that we have all done things which hurt people, caused us to lose a friend, or some consequence which made our subsequent experiences less than ideal.

And yes, I hear you…you optimists and others in the back of the room who insist we should not regert decisions or the varieties of realities which are foisted upon our existential backs…I hear you. Even if we would or should not regret having lived through whatever has happened, the simple fact is that some of our decisions have been bad ones, in terms of optimizing some meaning of well-being.

I know I would make different decisions, if I knew then what I know now. Oh, how I would make different decisions, in some places. And yes, others I would leave un-changed. The interesting part, dear reader, is how to tell these apart. Do I regret having moved into that house with that group of poly people? Do I regret breaking up with that amazing and brilliant woman I loved that (one?) time? Do I regret having quit my job last year?

I’m not here to answer those questions. But weary not, and do calm thyself and rest, assured that I am not sure the answers to whether I might change most of the decisions of my life. And in saying this our narrative course leads us back to my inevitable and central point, from which I perpetually stray in search of tangents which offer me both wisdom and tangential amusement in comparable measure. And in each of those moments of flying off towards a tangent or staying on task, is there not regret in each option? Were there not better words I could have utilized or perhaps better to have stayed more convicted on one side of the continuum of scatterbrained and laser-focused ideals?

I will allow that tangent to go where it will, and not follow it for now.

If I knew then….

It’s such a banal question, at this point, that I almost feel embarrassed using this trope. I wonder, in the moment, if this is a literary tool which I could merely hint at, with a wink, rather than hone in on and follow. This trope is another tangent, one which connects in just the right way for me at this moment, that I find it irresistible. I must follow it.

But if you could go back, let’s say into the body of your past self, carrying your memories to any point in your life (and given my non-dualist stance, this is a problematic philosophical puzzle. And this tangent I shall wink at and keep my trajectory constant towards tired tropes). But to when? Last week? 20 years ago? Perhaps the very beginning of your sentience? So many choices.

I will not be coy; I would absolutely do it in a heart-beat. The question is to what moment in my life would I return? And as I think about at what temporal target I would aim, the problem of my trigger-happy firing myself into my past self begins to become clear. There is a complicated calculus of precisely when everything started to go wrong, isn’t there? Assuming you can only do so once, the choices might become dizzying and cause uncertainties in the whole project.

Is the target that one nightmarish memory, or were there several which are good candidates? Was it that one decision? Perhaps for some it is, but not for me. Whichever moment we might choose, the problem is that there was, in that moment, a certain point of view which we had which led to the thing which we seek to undo. With later perspective carried with us, we annihilate that moment and replace it with a new one, but we don’t annihilate the memory of that lesson, the mistake doesn’t disappear.

Let’s say that I decide to go back to the day I got married. Or maybe to the day I met my (then) future wife, and perhaps not pursue her as I have concluded that the marriage was a mistake. But was it a mistake? At the time it felt right. But also, at the time, I didn’t know what I would know ten years later, so I couldn’t have done otherwise….

Oh, right, free will is an illusion, and all of this is mental masturbation….

Alright, never mind that, we know, we don’t care; we like masturbating. So was that, whatever moment you choose to return to, was that the moment whence your problems started? Had you made a different decision, you wouldn’t be feeling like this, right now. You wouldn’t be regretting your choices, and things would be better.

The bottom line is there probably is no end to that line of questioning. Because if if your one big mistake was the thing that made all the difference, carrying that knowledge back to that moment and doing otherwise will still haunt you as it does right now, because you are still carrying that decision with you, just not the consequences for everyone else…until that wound inside you, maybe, keeps haunting you until another action takes the place of the one undone. In other words, once present, the mistake can only be erased by erasing yourself. For example, going back and not carrying your memories and experiences with you would inevitably result in the same actions to happen as they did the first time, the lessons forgotten, and the loop goes round and round, and all that wisdom is lost each time you go back to that moment when you left yourself behind.

To put my point in stark relief, your decision will stick with you so long as you continue to have memories of it. So the only important question is whether you are going back in order to save yourself, or others? Are you trying to save your own life, or the life of those you may have hurt? And, here’s another one to keep you up at night; perhaps you go back, avoid hurting those other people, but as a result of that decision your life is even worse than it was when you chose to undo it all? Did that solve the problem?

One wonders whether Jesus of Nazareth pondered such questions when he walked in the Garden of Gethsemane (metaphorically?) before deciding whether he was going to sacrifice himself (to himself, definitely metaphorically) after having previously sent himself from (metaphorical) eternity in order to place himself in a specific time and place in all of the universe in order to die (metaphorically) for all our sins. I think I see the beginnings of a rather amusing comic about YHWH contemplating making himself into Jesus in Palestine in our year 1 or so, and grappling with the temporal, philosophical, and existential questions contained in this choice. We’ll call it Choises Christ (name is a WIP).

There are reasons such religious myths continue to remain relevant, I think.

Getting back to where we are

Ok, so we fucked up. We see situations from different, and perhaps more wise, perspectives having been in similar situations. We can’t undo the mistake, at least not for ourselves. And some of us think about these little moments in our lives, making us wince, feel loss, or maybe laugh at the anachronistic humor of it all. What of it?

I think that one of the things we forget is to ask ourselves what future us will think of us, right now. And While I know many people do think about this (in some cases too much), perhaps that is the wrong thing to focus on as well. Perhaps, if we shift our focus to the side a bit, another thing becomes clear.

When you made that decision, way back when, there was something you didn’t know. You know it better now, maybe. You can’t blame yourself for all of it, so you move forward. But more importantly, there are things that future you will know, and things that other people, right now, watching you in your moment, right now, who will understand your moment in a different way, of which you are not privy. In short, there are many, perhaps infinite, other perspectives than your own of your now now (yes, that was a Spaceballs reference).

And what you are certain of, whatever lesson you carry with your from your past, might not be wisdom. It may turn out to be another kind of error; another kind of decision which will define your future self in future moments of regret. Thus, the lesson to take from seeing other people exist in moments of error is not to focus on them, but to focus on whatever bit of wisdom you might offer them. Because it may be the case that your wisdom, in the right now, is the folly of both future you and all those looking on, knowingly. That is, sometimes we learn the wrong lessons, or perhaps not the whole lesson, and we attach ourselves to that error, as part of our ongoing identity.

Thus the greatest guide in each moment is the humility that you just might not have the wisdom, answers, or even best perspective in any of your past-self-flagellation or criticism of others. And we can prove this to ourselves by looking at ourselves from the point of view of metaphorical eternity, that is, from all possible yous, all of whom could potentially be wrong.

There is a multiverse of yous with multitudes of views, decisions, and whole philosophical systems of thought which you wouldn’t recognize, and yet to each one of those yous out there, each one feels as natural as yours does to you. Similarly, for every stupid, brainwashed, or ignorant fool you see out in the world, their moment seems as natural as yours does in seeing their error.

I feel as if I am invoking Erasmus, and his Praise of Folly (an outstanding book, which I highly recommend)

The problem with identity

I’m reading Yascha Mounk’s new book The Identity Trap, which I recommend and look forward to finishing (I got distracted reading a bunch of Foucault and others, to gain more perspective on the philosophical background to the points he was making). And while I don’t want to dig too deeply into his central point (with which I generally agree), I want to add a thought, relative to the above.

One of the reasons I have been skeptical and critical of much of the new [woke/identity synthesis/etc] sets of ideas over the years is I sensed, within it, people taking themselves too seriously. I have referred to it as self-righteousness in the past (see here, here, and especially here), but fundamentally it is this blindness, whether it be historical or personal, wherein people fail to realize that the lessons they have learned might be the wrong ones; perhaps their learned life lessons are the cause of the error they are making right now. Their intentions may be good, but in each moment people tend to cling to identities, convictions, and cultural affiliations which only serve as obstacles. And being that these obstacles are of our own making, it amounts to us getting in our own way. We lug around this identity, and the cultural meta-narratives which we build socially with our tribes, and don’t see how this distorts our ability to be, moment-to-moment.

By holding onto this concept of an identity, by making the world about definitions—the thin skin we talk and think onto the unseen noumenal reality we cannot hold onto—we lose the moment and try to put it in a bottle. By creating steadfast classifications of what we are, we lose ourselves to those definitions, and it pulls us away from the moment.

Foucault didn’t want to be classified as a ‘homosexual’ because he thought that the term was too confined, covered in cultural baggage, and essentially he thought that such groupings and categorizations get lost on the miasma of language and society.

Similarly, each of us, in every moment, in clinging to some pride in our identity or social grouping, especially if based on things that are outside of our ability to choose (and if free will isn’t real, that’s everything), are literally losing ourselves in each and every moment we persist in clinging to cultural identities.

We are chaining ourselves, limiting ourselves, with cultural trends which may turn out, in the future, to have been awful fads. There is, most definitely, an element of social contagion to ideas of all kinds; we have always done this. These social contagions are among the forces which push history around, creating dominant narratives which we feel obliged to enforce. It’s how religion creates heathens and nations aliens. It’s one of the most fundamental aspects of culture, and I’m not sure if there is a way to be social and to not do this, except maybe for each individual to take themselves, their identities, and their cultural tribal affiliations less seriously.

Yes, I’m still banging that old gong.

We get carried away by cultural tides, all of us.

And we all forget this, most of the time. We are find ourselves lost in the right now.

At least once a day, just be. Don’t be anything in particular, just be. And if we can all do this, more and more often, we might find that we have been demonizing and canceling others based upon mirages of self, tied to culturo-historical identities and meta-narratives.

Wouldn’t it be tragic if our destructive behaviors were all due to being swept up in absurd cultural fads? Well, that might be exactly what is happening.

The surprise of the inevitable

How can it be that I am surprised by the banality of our species when I was expecting it for all my adult life? Is the culprit Hope? Did her claws dig into my back, in her ecstasy or reverie I cannot be certain, sufficient to snatch my attention from what was my birthright? Can the boy who imagined a world of disappointment grow into a man who is disappointed in the world he finds himself within? One would think that I would have seen it coming, and yet somehow I’m surprised.

This is a story of sapience obstructed by sentience. It is of the mundane acting as a filter, a lens, or even Maya itself acting as a defense mechanism against the awful reality that stands at the core of whatever heavenly truths lay at our feet. God is dead, for sure, but so is Brahma. We have killed all the deities. And perhaps Nietzsche also saw that in doing so, we have killed our own imagination and creativity. For in being the creators of gods, who so graciously gave us our intellect, creativity, and our very souls, we have given dominion to the rules which we created to preserve the temples to our dead gods.

Has it ever occurred to you that we created laws? Rules too. In fact, all the various guiding stars of our world we put there, ostensibly, to make things better for us all. And, I suppose, there is some truth to this trope of culture. And yet, how often do the majority of us find ourselves bristling against such gilded ceilings. We gaze up at them, marveling at their complexity and staticity (oh but patience! We can change them if we work together! Vote!) and we are distracted by the fact that they hide the sky. I’m sorry; I am instructed to correct myself and say that they protect us from the elements, from nature red in tooth and claw.

This is precisely how I came to be caught pants-less with Hope, in delicto flagrante, hiding from my very own self. I found myself mesmerized by the this thin skin covering reality. The economic necessity of it makes this…error?–That is an open question—it makes this set of circumstances understandable.

But, if I haven’t made this completely clear, I was thinking about all of this. Decades of reading philosophy, talking people’s ears off about Nietzsche, spending a summer reading Foucault, writing long screeds that almost nobody reads….

All so that I find myself at middle age, surprised in an unexpected way. And my regurgitated thought keeps circling back to the obvious trope; this is what the crisis is. This psychological trauma is not just mine, even insofar as it is all mine at the very same time. This is the human condition. A condition that while universal, isn’t ubiquitous nor always perceivable.

The catalyst?

A couple of weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine from school, Frankie Trataglia, died suddenly. As a person who was pretty well known around town, his memorial was well-attended, and the shock of it was obvious. This led to two separate, but related, things happening to me in particular. The first is the obvious reminder of mortality and its unpredictable timing for all of us. But the second was more impactful to me. You see, I’ve had social anxiety for as long as I can remember. And this led to some rather awkward relationships with the other kids in school. I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I was spacey, shy, and distant from most people, and insofar as the “cool kids” went, I seemed to be able to slide into their lives for brief intervals, and was never sure if the jokes were good-natured or not. My wager is a bit of both.

And seeing these kids, grown into adults with kids of their own, showed me that not much has changed. I still am not sure whether I’m in on the joke or I’m the joke. I was surprised to see that whatever confidence and certainty I can muster in my adult stage of life, I’m instantly thrown into my teenager’s self and soul as soon as I’m back in that world. And I can’t tell if it’s in my head or real. What’s the difference, right? I create the world, don’t I? You’re all just NPCs in my simulation. But what I didn’t and still don’t know is which type of NPC I am in their simulations. I only knew that the world was ugly and we are all stuck in our own simulations. And I also knew that a pretty unique and interesting simulation was gone, and that one day mine will be gone too.

And I knew this when I was 16.

And yet I am surprised.

The Reaction

I resigned from my job. I told my former supervisor, as I walked out of the office, that he’s an idiot. And in a set of (important?) ways, he is an idiot. My friend assures me it’s bad management. I might have been able to save my place there, albeit with some awkwardness, but I knew that it was time to go. So, not knowing what was next, without a plan, and during a time when I was already beleaguered by seasonal depression, I peaced out. It was simultaneously a decision which was absolutely necessary for my mental health and which may have terrifying consequences for the rest of my life. There is no regret, but there is a fair amount of uncertainty and fear, associated with this necessary decision.

When I did the necessary deed, the news of Frankie’s death had already reached me. It hadn’t yet cut into me, but it had a grip on me. It would be some days after leaving the office, the word ‘idiot’ ringing in my head, before the reunion of high school people (wordplay intended) wherein I would revisit old traumas, but the chemical reaction was already initiated. There was no way that I was going to make it out of this intact. Something had to change.

I can’t go back to working for some other corporation, can I? The dehumanization of it, the sterile, static, covering of it. Another Sistine chapel disguising the sky. It’s rules, policies, and culture stifling to creativity or nuance. It’s pay sufficient but uninspiring. It’s HR department never your friend.

And if corporations are people, they make a twisted and grimy culture of individuals, If I were to borrow from certain religious images (as I am apparently wont to do), I would say that Babylon is building its tower even yet, as the Lord descends his hand to destroy it. We have created a world of laws, rules, and institutions which were meant to protect and to guide us. And while ‘failure’ might be too strong a word, I think it’s appropriate to point out the displeasure that so many people have concerning the nature of this human project. The Structures aren’t going to hold as is. And yet we find ourselves mesmerized by the thin skin of this illusion—this Maya—of the protection we are supposedly under.

I don’t believe it. And I knew this when I was 16.

So, why am I so surprised? And, perhaps more importantly, by what specifically am I surprised?

I’m still working it all out, but I think I’m mostly surprised that I wasn’t able to dodge it. It’s not that I thought myself in some way superhuman (was I to expect I was one of the ubermenschen?), but that I thought that being aware of the problem might be enough to avoid at least some significant portion of it. But there is no avoiding it. You see, what I knew at 16 was that the world was awful and that too many awful people were in control. What I don’t think I was willing to admit, until fairly recently, is I don’t think there’s a fix.

There’s no fix because people aren’t evil. There’s no such thing as bad people or good people (although, perhaps there are important gradients), there is just the fact that we are all mesmerized by the skin of the cultures in which our minds were programmed. To solve the problem, we would have to be able to transcend that (I’m reading Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which introduced the idea of the “veil of ignorance”—a theoretical fantasy), and I don’t think anyone can. Not even me.

There is no Justice. Perhaps there can be justices, but there’s no fix. We’re all going to die, we’re going to disagree, condemn, and feel self-righteous at times, but all the tribes are run by people mesmerized by the thin skin of our cultural programmings, and we might as well burn it all down as enjoy our pretty ceilings.

Perhaps this is the depression talking, but I do remember some study demonstrating how depressed people have a more objective perspective. Doesn’t bode well.

I hope everyone is enjoying their gilded ceilings.

Accommodating to Connotation

Since the discussion about the word “shallow” and such with my last post, I have had a couple of discussions with people about the pragmatism of bowing to popular connotations of words. Essentially, I’m being too literal and not understanding that some words simply have connotations that color them, I’m being told. Therefore, if I choose to ignore those popular connotations I will invite mis-communication.

While I can point back to what a word really means, according to a dictionary or a philosophical tradition (for example), having a reasonable explanation for ignoring commonly used connotations of a word is not going to help when I inadvertently offend or confuse someone such that they ignore any more that I have to say out of annoyance. After all, as Wittgenstein said, it is the use of a term that really provides the context for meaning.

This problem of word connotation, use, and definition is actually a problem that atheists have in general, as the term “atheist” is (mis)understood by many to mean something other than how I and the vast majority of the atheist community uses it.

And because of the misunderstanding of this term in our culture (and the world), atheists have had to re-educate people to a different usage. That is, the common usage by many people was simply wrong. It didn’t matter that it came to mean Satan-worshiper, immoral heathen, or person who says there absolutely is no god. What mattered was that when actual atheists came out of the closet, they didn’t fit into these definitions. When the term is analyzed in context to the relevant philosophical questions, the use that makes sense is “lacks belief in any gods.” Connotations be damned!

Shaming and depth-evaluation

So, when Greta Christina started defending fashion (I know, I’m writing about it again!) as not being shallow (also not vain or trivial), she was defending it against the negative connotations of the word. She was shallow-shaming. She was not only saying that fashion is not shallow, but if it were, then it would probably be a bad thing. So when someone called her out on this, saying that fashion does seem to fit the criteria as being shallow, she reacted as if they had claimed that a thing she cared about was stupid, not deserving of attention, etc. But what was really happening was a re-evaluation of the term shallow, and our orientation towards how we think about having shallow interests.

Much of our culture and the daily lives we live are shallow. Further, much of it is primarily and overwhelmingly shallow. Many of us like our home sports team to win, the physical appearance of our lovers, and that our political candidates appear to be saying something important. The surface-level part of the majority of our existence is, well, superficial and quite distracting from what lies (clever pun intended) underneath .

But there is depth under those things, and many people appreciate that too. The relative level of how much we care about one or the other is the criteria, I believe, by which we should judge a person, and not whether they actually like anything that does not dig very deep at any point. Like fashion. I will not hold anyone to the standard of never being irrational, never liking anything primarily shallow, or generally not living up to whatever standards we impose upon them. So, appreciate fashion and baseball if you like, but stop pretending that these things are not shallow and trivial.

Standing up to Connotations

Connotations certainly shift word-usage over time. The question is to what extent it is legitimate to stop, once in a while, and say “wait, I think that the connotation which has built up around this word is philosophically problematic and has implications which you may not be aware of.” Or you might say something less complicated, if you are not me.

But at bottom it is sometimes useful to recognize that we may be demonizing a term (like “shallow” or “slut”), artificially heightening it (like “faith”), or even unnecessarily moderating it (like “accommodationist”). Sometimes the connotations of words are not valid, if considered carefully. Sometimes we need to step up and declare that the way our culture, or a segment of it, uses a word is simply problematic or wrong.

There is nothing inherently wrong with liking shallow pursuits, being a slut, or being an atheist. There is nothing inherently good about having faith, and we should not give that term the free pass it usually gets in our culture. And we should not consider accommodationists (those nice atheists who defend religion and apologize for us mean atheists) as being the wise, moderate, and fair critics they think of themselves as; sometimes a thing is just wrong, and there is nothing wrong with pointing that out.

So, yes, fashion is shallow and I’m pointing that out. Like fashion, do you? I don’t care, nor will I judge you as a bad person based solely on that fact. Only like things like fashion, weight lifting, pop music, sports, and interior design? Well….