—Leverage and Stupidity—
Last week, one comment called me loquacious. Another, pompous. Those are hard to deny. Though I maintain that these description blurbs are tongue-in-cheek, they also have a strong basis in reality. Further, it's an evasion to seek shelter from criticism under the wide umbrella of satire. For years, Jon Stewart used this defense for his "Daily Show" as it functioned as a de facto news program. Note that it's now much different; Stewart's hyphenated successor is a whiny, angry, intellectually dishonest, ultra-partisan hack. This week, I'll do nothing of either sort. No comedy. Instead I'll be brutally honest. Do the same—feel free to let the hurt-words fly. My skin is tougher than you think, because it's not really my ego you'll hurl them into.
It's hard to remember what I say where. I'm a serial comment-writer, both on and off my channels. On average, these fingers spew several thousand words a day. A dozen or more some days, time permitting. It's cathartic and compulsory, and journal-writing is pointlessly solipsistic. Might as well shout into a drain pipe. At least there'd be an echo.
Recently I was exchanging with someone on the topic of ego death, or the dissolution of the self, which is the part of you that cares about being insulted. It has been a long time since I thought of myself as a progenitor of ideas. See, having good ideas is like having good looks: they just come to you if you're lucky. Yeah yeah, lots of ideas take grit & polish, sure. Development of an idea is one thing, but having the space to give rise to it in the first place is something entirely different; this is a natural aspect, a compulsion, a condition of your reality. Our minds gravitate towards their inclinations: the musical mind to the tune, the pictorial mind to the canvas, the mathematical mind to the model. These artistic appetites continue even in our sleep. We develop these 'gifts' neither through choice nor tenacity, but through something entirely different: obsession. Nobody gets a choice. The brain is a vine that grows.
The mind builds on its unique interests with or without your consent. Once, as we were walking over the bridge,¹ my old philosophy professor asked rhetorically, "If we have freewill, then why do people choose to fall in love with the wrong person?"
On with the show. If my honesty is compulsory, then don't throw tomatoes at my having a cocky, cynical, critical nature. It's not the intention to offend when I say that most of us are stupid. It's just a statistical assertion. Go read The Bell Curve. See, that's the thing about my own arrogance; it's not that I've ever believed myself clever, so much as I now see that 'most' naturally aren't. Most of you sleep soundly at 4 AM, as I toss while rotating geometry in my head, so no thanks if I don't want to humbly accept some feigned appreciation for having a 'gift,' especially when that's just a euphemism for getting me to perform for you. That sh!t started when I was only a kid: grandpa was proud, and competitive with his brother (an old college professor and savage interlocutor), and they both came from a misogynist age, so naturally I was coerced into demonstration for them. Showing off was an embarrassing act; not only the focused attention, and the increased expectations, and the under-the-surface resentment from others, but the whole spectacle.
Spectacle—that's it. That's the jelly donut hidden in your footlocker. Well, eat it. You all want to see abnormality: the extreme, bizarre, and uncharacteristic. Well, here I am; a miserable recluse. Despite years of frustrated attempts to find mutual understanding, nearly everything I say still gets misinterpreted. I lack the language. It's been years since I've seen my family. Some gift.
And so we come to leverage and stupidity. Or rather, tools and their users. See, both leverage and stupidity are variable by degree. The pair share a relationship in which one ought not become disproportionate to the other. A crude example would be a chimp holding a gun: one is a lever, and the other, stupid. A lever is a designed extension of our will, and our stupid is the incursion of reality's limitations upon that will. While we may conceive of our aspirations as pure, noble, and intelligent, they nevertheless remain tethered to our ego and its physical self, and to all of the associated (narrow) desires. The more worldly we try, the more provincial the result. I have never felt so small, insecure, and forsaken as I have in that shuddering moment when I first realized that 'most' of you are not better equipped to hold a lever.
¹the bridge is both literal and metaphorical. At this university, sciences and humanities were in their own clusters of buildings, these separated by both a creek and an ideological divide. If ever there were a born bipartisan, it's me. Never could decide which half of the false dichotomy I was more (or rather, less) comfortable in. I liked the bridge.
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