Glaciers

Emergent systems are inevitably simplifications of the complex systems from which they emerge. Information handling is a necessary problem to the extent that a system grows in degree of complexity, creating a natural niche for information management strategies to be devised. Just as there was a first dinosaur to show feathers, and later a first to use these for flight, so there was in time primordial a first system to chunk, and likely a later first to chunk so effectively that it boiled down the most complex system in the known universe to a single name.

A name to summarize a fool.
A fool to summarize the public.
A public to summarize a people.
A people to summarize a God.
A God to summarize Creation.
Creation to summarize our transition from a chaos with nothing but hope, to an order with none at all.

We live our lives in the spirit of the universe,
stuffing gods into bodies; summarizing. Simplifying. Building, and all of it nothing but a headstone delineating all we were from all we never managed to be.

But I wonder. If a headstone may be built the full breadth and depth of Creation itself; if we didn't stop at simplifying, but just used it as a means to an end, then we might draw a map of the Universe in the ink of its very substance, creating new complexities out of our models of the old ones. Out headstone would be our full lives standing above a grave without depth.

Ah. If you build as wide as the Universe, you never shut yourself off from the abyss, never stop building yourself into a bridge further in. Never lose hope.

Gravestones

By the ethic of virtue, we learn that our most fundamental concern is being the best sort of person we can, such that all of our chosen actions and their consequences should be of the best quality of which we are capable. By the ethic of utility, we learn rather to concern ourselves most fundamentally with the consequences themselves, since proclaiming the best of intentions from beneath the rubble achieves nothing more than self-indulgence.

A thing in the world is so solid, after all, so confident in what it is and how it fits in creation that it doesn't even have need of personality to be maintained; it just is, like the greatest ambition of a navel-gazing monk on a mountaintop. The self, by contrast, is a slippery maze of melting walls that trembles to its core with every step you take in pursuit of its escape; it is death incarnate, this consciousness, for in all creation the only thing which may ever truly end is the conception of a thing by a mind in contemplation, and the ego is shaped by the dismissal of possibilities.

All people will die before the scope of eternity, as every mountain will be scattered to the winds that never cease, but to prize the self over its products is not to reasonably sustain any hope of immortality. It is not that you will live forever if you never compromise, for indeed the human frame is a more fragile thing than a mountain, but rather that you will survive THIS day, that the thing your body wakes and remembers to be tomorrow will not be remembered as less than you are today, will not be disillusioned of those truths to which illusions are the lifeblood.

Investing your self in the works of the world is no shortcut to immortality, nor even a trick to protract it beyond the endurance of your flesh.  The castles of sand we build are not Us, but our memorials, the testaments to all that we've left behind us while still alive. Gravestones, grand and shiny and guaranteed to persist though the seas rise and the sun consumes us all, can still only ever say who we were.

Believe

Losing faith doesn't feel like a betrayal; it is in humility, after all, to doubt, to question. But be the one in whom faith is lost, and you will feel its importance, feel how fundamental trust is to distinguishing friend from stranger, tribe-member from non-person.

Our lives are, in part, an effort to fool all those around us without ever being fooled ourselves, among so many others being just as careful. We know this, know we have a number of faces, know that family sees personality that coworkers don't, and knowing this seek out people who can fool us, and fool us about fooling us, for long enough for us to show ourselves to them without having to be careful.

And there's the betrayal. When you put yourself out there, quite self-servingly, you do it on the promise of someone just as weak and fallible as yourself; rest your weight on their bootstraps since you obviously can't just lift your own. This isn't a promise you demand, but rather that same promise we make each other compulsively, irresponsibly, and of necessity: This is me.

And you trust. You trust them to get it, to get You, on the basis of their own story and your own guesswork about them. If you are wrong about them, they will misunderstand, and if you can't admit to being wrong you'll blame them for misjudging you.

Having faith in someone means admitting that you can be wrong about them, means acknowledging the entity beyond the bounds of your imagination and every belief you have about them. Having faith in someone, while being misunderstood by them, means not letting the story you tell become retarded by the feedback you're getting; it means still believing that they can get it when they don't at first, or indeed seemingly ever.

I think this is why the word "faith" is so often used to describe propagating falsehood, for indeed to selectively acknowledge information about the natural world is to use unnatural wealth to purchase ignorance for the sake of comfort; anti-vaxer movements in the third world never seem to reach a critical mass, just sayin'.

And yet to selectively acknowledge the dispositions of people is an interactive experience, quite different from what we typically mean by delusion. When a loved one insults you, you can take this for their honest opinion or for evidence of a bad day, and react appropriately. When a stone falls upon your head, however, there is no person involved whose motivations you may reasonably credit for the event; saying otherwise is what I think of as personalizing the world, conflating the rules Natural Reality(physics, primates) with those of Social Reality(God, people), and then attempting to affect change in the system by expressing humanity rather than expressing force. I think that a more common, if less interesting, consequence of this tendency to misattribution is the human(and arguably long prior) habit of Depersonalizing other humans through outgrouping for the sake of carrying out intertribal conflict, applying force to sentient systems for he sake of reinforcing group identity.

Faith is necessary, you see, not just to practicing empathy but indeed to being receptive to it. Without taking the leap of believing in a person or group, all you can see is their components, humans and their prejudices; it is the psychological, rather than biological, needs of humans that are expressed in the imperatives of our moral systems, because the purpose of those systems is maintaining the health of communities, not individuals.

Emergent Systems

I set out to take responsibility for myself. Really. It's just the only way I could see to do so was to map out just how thoroughly I could never hope to; you need to find your levers before you can pull them responsibly.

But oh yes, progress. Levers indeed. Once it was just a process of establishing contrast: you make up a character that's you in every way except one, then run with it until you get depressed or anxious or it otherwise falls apart(you can only stage so much of a peanut allergy, trust). In this way you can map your own internal logic, figure out how your values work with each other; compassion and self-denial, for example, could become either charity or martyrdom, depending on what sort of insecurities they each interact with.

Being Your Self

Expressing yourself amounts to telling a story about your feelings, both to your audience and to yourself. The function of this act is to rationalize the imperatives our bodies place on us into a coherent and predictively useful model of our behavior, again both for our own benefit and for that of the social machinery in which we participate. This is how personality grows, or is grown, depending on whether you're the student or the parent.

There is a distinction, though, between what is accomplished for an audience and what is accomplished for oneself. The audience is your social machine, remember, and so its judgment amounts to how well you fit into its group dynamic. Self-judgment has different foundations, however, for the system of capacities and drives that disposes us so readily to immerse ourselves in society also, quite accidentally I imagine, enables us to view ourselves hypothetically.

A self-hypothesis is distinct from a personality in that a self-hypothesis is demonstrably not presently the case, like a physical ability, while a personality is composed of models independent of natural reality and so unconfirmable, like attitudes or prejudices.

This capacity for self-hypothesis works almost like a mechanism of revision or growth for society, for as we imagine ourselves rich or popular or adequately fed, we necessarily imagine a world in which this would be so, and we yearn. This yearning, I believe, is responsible for the lion's share of human-directed change to our society, whether intentionally through social justice movements or unintentionally through personal ambition.

An aside from reality

Some people use guns as tools, and some use them as security blankets. The people using them as tools are neutral as threats, because as tools guns may be used either to initiate, or to minimize, violence against others. The security blanket crowd, though, is Universally Dangerous, because they possess a gun for what it represents rather than what it actually does. Such folk imagine guns to function mainly as threats rather than tools of violence, planning if possible in instances of need to use the firearm as a symbol of dominance over someone, like on television. These people are dangerous simply for the fact that if they Do use their weapon, it will be reactive and unplanned, and thus less predictable.

Now, there are those in the world who believe that the security blanket crowd is the only sort of gun owner there is, that the modern world has no proper function for assault weapons in the hands of the general public; even if this assumption doesn't necessarily equate to believing that firearms should be banned entirely, it still undermines the perspective of gun rights advocates as essentially founded on personal insecurities. This isn't really so surprising: just as the Christian brand has been stained by lunatics & the Conservative brand has been stained by bigots, gun owners get to make their arguments from behind the people carrying assault rifles in restaurants & shooting up elementary schools.

I tend to sympathize with efforts to restrict public access to firearms, if only to make competence more of a prerequisite to legal ownership than it currently is, but this is only an outgrowth of my fundamental concern that everyone around me is insane. I understand that some have a great deal of faith in the reliability of the average person to act both righteously and responsibly when confronted with a threatening situation. I think I can only agree that such a person is possible, and that I would aspire to be one if so confronted, but even then I can't say I'm sure how I'd behave; I'll agree that I'd like the right to find out, though, if only because I don't think death is the worst thing out there.

Fears

Speculating on irrational fears(since after all the simple power of consensus must logically make the most common irrational fears the least obvious), and I'm thinking divestment from your problems might be a bigger one than it's credited as. Part of the standard banter of human speech is discrediting the concerns of others, after all, suggesting their value systems to be founded upon relatively uninformed or simple models of reality. We do this ruthlessly enough, and yet the sort of contest going on here is exactly the sort at play when someone challenges your racial- or gender-identity. A value or moral system is fundamental to an identity, after all.

Useless

Once someone has a role in your life, it's hard not to judge them for how well they fill it; harder to empathize, to remember that they are a person like you and, like you, live at the center of a very impersonal world in which their own relevance depends entirely on how well they function within the social systems they rely on.

I try so hard to remember this, to make people as useless to me as possible so that I can still appreciate this beauty you can only find in useless things, so that I can stay interested long enough to grasp the principles behind this system we call the person or soul. Self-awareness is the template for every relationship we ever know, and my progress in this task of self-definition has yielded a wealth of late-bloomed social skills, but still the odd sleepless night compels me to wonder at where I'm going with this.

Form as few relationships as possible, that I should never find anyone lacking before my expectations of them, that I may resist the temptation to frame people as instruments, that I may study without bias the psychology and philosophy behind our use of the concepts of self and other, that I may grow ever more skilled at...forming relationships...

*sigh* See, this is why I get along with strangers so much better than I do the people I love -_-