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Michael considered fate at 12:51   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Somehow I give people the benefit of the doubt most of the time which most who know me would either agree that a) this phenomenon doesn't exactly match my character (or their perception thereof) or b) I am lying about my benefit-giving. I don't think I am lying, so that leaves a: a none-obvious character trait which is somehow masked in me by other, perhaps more overarching, traits.

So while I'm busy berating goodly god-fearing folk (the facetiously ironic term god-fearing not having escaped me here but nevertheless being saved for a scathing post of a later date) vis-a-vis my last post on viruses (not to be confused with the hacker's colloquial "virii" - the ultimate latin meaning of which is "men"; the irony in that also not having escaped me) it may not appear to the common eye that I have any sense of acceptance or owing of one's rights of belief. This is entirely not true and I stand by the statement that I am more accepting than your average vir (man) which is the real crux of the matter: man (vir) is not overly effective at admitting other's inalienable right to unique thought (read: own beliefs).

Setting my own inequities aside for the moment, let us consider the very being of man. To be is to have thought and, by that arrow, we are bound to a flight through those airs (and here I speak of affectation as well as mien, those two lovers who fight like the roses, thorns entangled and intertwined). We can't anymore ignore our predilections than we can choose to know what other options proffer themselves; in some respects we could almost forgive all of our inevitable sins of mountebankery for this fact if not for the other hand, that of our own uniqueness.

Each and every one of us, while implicitly asked to lie in a moulage (as if we were to be judged if we failed to conjure upon us a jacket of reason, juried if it does not fit), nonetheless can not choose to be or not to be; it is not a question in this respect (?) though fitting to compare to Shakespeare's particular version wherein the troubles of life are weighed against the options of death. Here I talk of the choice of thought - one which, though we may fictiously motion to dispatch, never can leave us in our earthly form. Thought is not function nor form but the very awareness of being, the lightness that leaps our minds from within our brains and allows for transcendentallism (of which I speak of the most limited form as a common characteristic of all men).

So there it is; our inalienable right to thought (being) which, if taken from us, requires the sequestration of our corporal form to be tossed upon the pyre by some thing, person, or institution which, by it's own edict, has deemed our rights as a citizen of the human race null and void. This edict, attempting to build self-effacement along the way under the guise of wellness of the group, as it goes through generation to generation, creates the illusion of thought in men; like a wall in the mind between original and learned ideas, it is only through a judas that our true selves peak out at the world - one way, and unable to communicate with the outside world.

This viral growth of groups does not squelch our individual knowledge of self but hides it behind a curtain of pedagogic scholarship. It is our own panacea to ourselves, a doctor drunk on his own medicine, a placebic opiate for the masses as if we can ever climb away from the dark pits of fear and dispair that spiral beneath us like wormholes of questions (through which a jump may or may not contain an answer which may or may not be desired); we can only look away, through the one-way peephole. It is healthy here to remember that the monster under the bed exists only when one has not yet checked to see if it exists. This is the achievement of imagination or, alternately, the scientific method applied to the unknown. How do we account for that unnerving feeling, that need to pull the covers over our head and hide (quivering; a pool of jello with all it's inabilities to prevent itself from being eaten), except for the existence of a monster under our bed; a big, hairy hobgoblin of doubt up-ending our very existence?

So, when the option of the hypothetico-deductive method (in so much as a way of reasoning) is taken from one's choices and ideas are prescribed like medicines then the opium sets into the mind as rigor mortis applies to a body after death. When this imagination fails us it is the welfare state that has overdosed our conflicted souls.

And in this place we find innocence lost, our ability to believe in whatever we choose taken away, and replaced by those ideas presented by others. These, conflicting strongly with the views of some different socioeconomics, do present clearly comforting blankets; covers with which to climb under. But to believe them is to believe that there is only one right way of thinking, else the entire facade on which the group's premise is built might come crumbling down - or so we are shown to believe. This leads to the inability to accept - nay, allow - the options of others ever and anon as we ourselves have been limited in thought, life, and self-being. The very existence of their discordance presents friction enough to poke holes in our armour of teaching; doubt.

Tis a scary bight that doubt which offers up such a hole in the bucket as to present not only a way for ideas to flow out but - ahgast! - a way for different ideas to flow back in.

So though our friend William that bard of almost Avalonic myth, the son of Stratford-upon-Avon, may have meant Hamlet's speech as purely a question of life or death, in the most direct of senses, I will present a brief excerpt here as a suggestion that we can take from it perhaps more than simple suggestion for suicide; such as a question of belief, the ills we chance to wrought-up if we are not careful to allow it (in us and in others). The application of some limited allowance of individualism in any society is, in some ways, the actualization of an ethereal brain-death not unlike true bodily exodus from our physical dimensions.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

And though it seems death (that solid sleep) is imminent, lest we not forget the choices we always have to allow other's their own ideas:

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

Not to be confused with fantasy, these nightmarish possibilities Hamlet envisions, but here I consanguineously liken them to the human condition - whether in life or in death we are torn with these troubles and evermore will we be forced to face them; daydreams in life, nightmares in death, regardless we are plagued.

Bottom line? Remember, every mind is it's own so accept your neighbour's right to opinion or, as Rob in High Fidelity so eloquently put it, "How can it be bullshit to state a preference?"