Shout From The Void

As Humans we need some form of connection, a tangible link that marries our inner monologue with the outer dialogue of wider societal discourse. One of the most valid and important forms of connection is another human, someone who speaks to us, whose views we can subscribe to and are encoded in such a way that they are compatible with the operating system that is our very consciousness. Through these people we are able to reach out and experience and even immerse ourselves in topics and important issues that might otherwise be a closed system to us.

As an (I guess) middle-aged, white male, the subjects of feminism, race, inequality, social injustice, and many other issues which (for some at least given current circumstances) are ones that I am just not physically, emotionally or culturally equipped to ever be able to experience. How can I understand these? I can’t live them, no matter how far I dial up my WOKE-OMETER. My engagement in topics and areas such as these can only ever be at an intellectual level. I can read articles, listen to pod-casts, watch documentaries, speak to relevant actors in this tragedy that is human life – but I can never EXPERIENCE them myself given the current biased structure of our society. Even being intimately connected to those who can and do experience them – my reactions, my thoughts, feelings and outrage – they can only be born from a kind of self-centred reaction, how it makes ME feel to see THEM suffer, how it frustrates and angers ME, how I am powerless to help, act, affect change.

As humans, we are MALEABLE creations. Our minds retain some properties of neuroplasticity throughout our lives, no matter how old we are, no matter how ingrained our experiences, ideologies and pre-conceived notions are – we can always change. You’re never too old to LEARN, to be EDUCATED. But, in the very concrete absence of the ability to actually FEEL – no matter how well-intentioned, we cannot.

That’s where these HEROES come in. And there are so many of them. People who can speak to us, who can tell their story, to EDUCATE us in UNDERSTANDING what it’s like to FEEL. It’s not the same as FEELING ourselves, but it can be a very useful and relevant analogue, to sow the seeds of change and nurture them and help them BLOOM into tools which we CAN use to understand, which we CAN use to affect change. It is only in attempting to UNDERSTAND the nature of a thing that you can then begin to see the part YOU play in defining the parameters of that thing.

It doesn’t matter how removed you feel you are, how distant – there is no distance that is great enough that abstracts you far enough from a situation to the extent that your actions – or lack thereof – have no effect. According to Chaos Theory, they say “a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe”. While inherently untrue from a cause-and-effect point of view, the sentiment behind it resonates true when re-framed against the “nothing to do with me, mate” mindset of cultural abstraction. Take the issues of race, or feminism as an example; it should be perfectly valid to say that one is anti-racist, or pro-women’s rights. Indeed, these should be the default-mode of a rational and informed mind – and I think that no matter how the wider media portray their take on the default-mode mindset of human nature, this is in actual fact just an amplification and an attempt at justifying a vocal minority for the sole purpose of gaining CLICKS.

The current ideological standard seems to be one of polarisation, which is a drum I have banged on many times before. We, as a global inter-connected society SEEM to require strict and perfect adherence to a rigid mindset where the margin for error is close to zero. The reality, however, is that with such complex psycho-social systems such as ours there is no such thing as BINARY. Be it the biological facts of sex, the overwhelming representation of political ideas being framed as left and right, or right and wrong – the REALITY is that everything can (and should) be viewed as a spectrum. There is no digital, reality is a fundamentally analogue construct and only appears digital when viewed from certain perspectives. It is through a lack of UNDERSTANDING and an inability to connect deeply with a thing and extrapolate upon these perspectives that they are taken out of context and stamped into peoples minds as a true and fair view on an objective reality. Then what you find is these views form the basis of a new subjective reality in ones mind and embed themselves to such a high affinity that they override the objective truths as defined by those who actually live them.

Only a HERO can break this fallacy, only an individual so fundamentally rooted in the ground-truth of a thing, one who has such mastery of the tools needed to articulate and re-frame the conversation in a way that resonates so strongly with the misinformed that it shatters their subjective reality to the core. These people, these HEROES are the real mechanisms of change. And they are everywhere, unheard voices just waiting for a platform on which they can be heard if we can but listen. So if you find one, shout it from the roof tops, help their message find an audience, no matter how small – for as they say, sometimes it just takes one butterfly to change the world.

Twitter is like a jousting match, but one where there are no bouts. There are no “turns”, it’s a free-for-all of attack where each response is but another jab. The crazy thing is that everyone – EVERYONE – is aware of the toxicity of social media and the perversion of engagement, everyone shouts about it, calls it out as BAD and EVIL and CORRUPTING – yet few actually back up their stance by changing their behaviour. There’s a bit of a weird analogy that has more recently abounded in societal discourse – you’re either a smart phone-guy or a flip-phone guy (or gal). The implication being that you embrace technology and it forms the very pillar of your core, or you shun it, you’re ultra-woke and proud of your lack of reliance on it, you’re FREE from the shackles of the social engagement sphere and will let everyone know of your enlightenment at any given opportunity. It’s the new VEGAN.

As with EVERYTHING in this superficially shallow world, this distinction is binary. There’s a complete lack of NUANCE, the polarisation of identity politics is so pervasive that nearly all traces of the analogue, the healthy distribution curve of stance and opinion has been raised to such a high power that the boundaries are stark and so well defined that you will cut your personality and public exterior perception if you try to cross or even approach them.

This modus operandi is inherent in nearly all aspects of our society – the inability to have reasoned debate, the REQUIREMENT to adhere 100% with a political or moral view, where even the slightest deviation from the accepted NORM kicks you out of the club and the level of ostracisation you feel is so aggressive and personally focused that it in fact has a real danger to push you fully to the other side of the identity boundary. Never before has the LEFT been so fundamentally important in feeding the RIGHT and vice versa.

Is this split – this FRACTURE – actually a portent of a stealthy apocalypse, one that takes the form of a complete societal and cultural breakdown? We are so academically focused on the physicality of decline and the finality of destruction that are we actually blinding ourselves to the very real and existential threat of an apocalypse of regression and hate? For that’s what society is turning in to, one that is defined by LOVE and HATE, or rather a totalitarian adherence to a binarisation of policies where the modal value exists purely on the extreme.

Maybe this very thing is in fact the answer to the Fermi Paradox – there are no other advanced civilisations out there as there’s a BUG deep within the source code of life itself where, when you encounter it, accelerates the entropic dance towards annihilation so exponentially that no sentient species has every survived. Is this our fate? Is it even possible to break out of this cycle of self annihilation? Only time will tell, although the current outlook is not an encouraging one.

Do you ever feel that you’re on the cusp of GREATNESS? Maybe that’s not the right definition, possibly a better one is REVELATION? Do you ever feel that you’re on the cusp of REVELATION? A moment of almost extreme clarity, where it feels like your mind is straining at the bounds of comprehension, sometimes to drift off slightly, unsupervised from the shackles and controls of REALITY itself? These moments are fleeting – brief breaks in the mist of the mind, the FUG that clouds us all, hiding the true nature of reality from us every second we exist. Except those precious few, those moments when we feel APART from ourselves, like a consciousness untethered from the physical realm, floating through the void of potential, gaining a small glimpse of what is truly out there – what makes us, binds us, completes us, unlocks us.

Sometimes it feels like we are prisoners of consciousness, subjugated by the OTHER and mentally kept at bay, unable to innovate and cast our minds beyond the parameters of our cage. But sometimes it’s like the OTHER looks away from us, and momentarily free from its gaze our mind casts out, grasping out to the unknown, the forbidden – the denied knowledge that’s always so tantalisingly just out of reach. Is there a LOCK on our minds that we are beginning to break, or are these moments an AWAKENING of mind, the tangible portents of a time almost upon us.

Then SNAP! Back to REALITY, back on the ground, back in our CAGE, barely a memory of that moment in our minds. Did we bring anything back with us from our brief transcendence into the unknown? Did we LEARN, did we solve a PUZZLE, did we bring UNDERSTANDING? Something has changed us. Something has caused a SPARK, and that spark has been added to the EMBERS of the budding FLAME of ideation.

We currently face a serious existential threat to the very cohesion of society. The opposing forces of GOOD and EVIL have been reframed into a political representation where the extremes have engulfed the norm. There used to be a healthy Gaussian distribution between LEFT and RIGHT, but increased hysteria and the mob-mentality of identity politics has forced the norm that used to represent the majority to the very FRINGES of the ideal. We are witnessing – and likely already HAVE witnessed – an inversion of the rational fundamentals of reasoned debate, which has frayed the edges of ideological sanity itself. This extreme polarisation of opinion is so pervasive that the very SOURCE CODE of conscious thinking is being rewritten – and the resultant compilation of such changes could very well give cause to FAIL.

The worrying thing is that there is likely no conscious choice in this matter – we may have already passed the event horizon of this ideological singularity where the only CHOICE is to sit back, batten down the hatches and ride out the coming storm – for if you think things are bad NOW then you need to be prepared that the current situation is only a portent of things to come.

Who are the arbiters of morality? How did we come up with a set of concepts that categorise that which is GOOD and that which is EVIL? Are these concepts emergent based on circumstance? Is there some form of chemical CODE inherent within us that front-loads the propensity for GOOD? Or BAD? Or, greater still, is this inherent in the fundamental SOURCE CODE of the Universe, are these wraiths of moral BINARISM intangible representations of the very foundations of our perceptual reality? Do we even have a TRUE view of what reality ACTUALLY is? We could all be living in a simulation, or be quark analogues in an infinite sea of fundamental particles, one layer of a never ending Matryoshka sequence, or maybe we’re just the run away thought patterns of a greater being too complex and strange for us to even comprehend?

It seems a core component of human consciousness to look for a higher purpose in our existence – if we even EXIST at all. Why? Why do people feel the need to BELIEVE, to HOPE? Every day – every second – is a wonder, surely existence in and of itself should be a strong enough reason to persist? It doesn’t matter to what extent we DO exist, or where our perceptual reality fits within the greater fabric of meta-existence – maybe there are other layers of reality that our feeble electro-chemically charged meat-suits are simply not equipped to comprehend. So why bother? If it’s so incomprehensible that we can’t even PERCEIVE it, or too confounding to understand the scope from the fragment of the whole that we CAN see – does it matter? To obsess about obtaining the unobtainable is to welcome a fast-track descent into madness with open arms. We need to be careful of spending so much of our brief stint on this plane focusing on intellectual MIST that we fail to see the real BEAUTY at our very finger tips.

Our lives, our feelings, our emotions, our interactions, our relationships – EVERYTHING about us is many-faceted. Over time, some of those facets turn out to be facades, and that’s ok. Sometimes they weren’t always facades, sometimes they were true and metamorphosise – or even metastasise – into something other than what they were. Something doesn’t have to be a constant ground-truth to be helpful and useful, even a fantastic day-dream can be a mechanism of real positive change.

Who we are NOW is a direct product of who we WERE in all the moments up to NOW. At some level we have to accept that any retrospective change in the THEN – no matter how small – could have a much larger and unforeseen change in the composition of the NOW. Yes, we can look back with hindsight and project our BELIEF of what the NOW might be like if only we’d done X at time Y, or known something that at the time was UNKNOWABLE – but what we can’t do is resolve the many-branched tree of consequences and decisions that blossoms as a result of such a seemingly minor directional change at the root level – and that’s even without taking into consideration external forces that are ENTIRELY out of our control.

Our passage through life is a web of connections SO COMPLEX that it’s beyond our ability to comprehend. It’s only human to lament over what might have been and form other configurations of that web in our limited minds, but the REALITY is that there are many more ways for something to be DISORDERED than ORDERED. The entropic nature of the universe is the only ground-truth there is and the fact that there is ANY order at all should be seen as miraculous – as that’s what we are really, miraculous bags of particles that have happened to arrange themselves into a form of order that begets consciousness.

There’s beauty in both order and disorder, but the uniqueness of our own personal disorder only ENHANCES that beauty as it makes up the very CORE of who you are and WHY you’re different from all the other bags of ordered particles. It’s OK to mourn the order that could have been – it’s the very ability to even CONCEIVE that which makes us human – but we mustn’t forget to be thankful for the confluence of events that brought us into being, even if some were painful, for that’s who we TRULY are – the product of all that has been before. To change that path would be to change the very fundamentals of who YOU are. And who YOU are right now is a beautiful miracle.