Do you ever notice how....? Yeah, I notice things like that all the time. It seems to be one of the main ways my awareness of the world and myself advances. Which is probably a pretty sad way to advance. But anyway, I always seem to notice things about the world, often in simple pairs which form a paradigm.
Please note that these are all just theories! I realize they're limited.
And if these seem like childish toys to you, please write me and help me understand.
The plodding attempt to achieve order in the face of chaos.
Life is basically the attempt to make order out of chaos (that is, to counteract entropy), even though the ultimate victory of chaos seems inevitable. In other words, life is (or should be?) trying to make things perfect even though perfection is impossible.
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Giving a shit versus not giving a shit.
A nasty way to put it, but that's the truth. Some people in the world care about others and other things; some just don't. And the thing is, there's no real practical reason to care. It's really impossible to make someone start giving a shit, and trying to convince someone to do so is pretty impossible, too. If you argue that someone should care about others because it will eventually come back to them (via karma or hell or just "what goes around"), then you're not arguing for altruism; you're just arguing for macro-egoism or long-term selfishness. To be really good, to really care about other people with no concern for oneself wrapped up in it, is both nearly impossible to do and entirely unpragmatically reasonable. It is, however, necessary. So many people just don't care.
Their logic, their education, their whole way of being just does not include any awareness of the suffering of others, nor of the suffering that their ignorance brings upon others.
It's funny that Buddhism has many Buddhas of compassion (thus contradicting suffering), but so few Buddhas of knowledge (Manjusri being the main exception). Maybe the early Buddhists realized how damned difficult it is to spread real knowledge (i.e., knowledge about the nature of life).
And the thing is, life requires at least a little bit of not caring. It is impossible to live a life completely full of caring. Well, Jains try (the most devoted Jains actually wear face-masks to avoid killing as many microorganisms as possible) but don't really succeed. Life requires ignorance. Trying to be constantly aware of all creatures' suffering will just lead to complete ineffectiveness and mental paralyzation. If you want to do any good, you have to spend large amounts of time specifically not focused on the suffering of others. Isn't it fucking terrible that, in order to do any good, you have to not care? Psychologists see it as normal; Zen sees it as disattachment.
Well, I think both of them are just trying to flatten the effect (pardon the pseudo-pun). The world needs more caring, more awareness of others' suffering. And to make it all even more ironic, you can't make people care any more, either. What a world.
Another part of this is that, when people simply don't care, there is no way to reason with them. How do you tell someone who thinks money is the end-all be-all of human existence that other people are suffering because of their single-hearted pursuit of wealth? It's impossible to convince them if they have given over to a fully pragmatic level of uncaring. You can't even begin to communicate.
Yep, this is the big paradigm of late.
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Original languages vs. secondary languages
Chinese, Latin, Greek and maybe Sanskrit are original languages. While they have some roots from other languages, they mostly use their own vocabularies. Other languages, like English, evolved from other languages. English has multiple vocabularies, some formal (Latinate, Greek-derived) and some colloquial (usually Germanically-derived). Chinese, on the other hand, is mostly composed of word roots which are present within itself. Of course, all languages are composed of others which came before them, I know. But it still seems like there's some kind of monolinguistic insularity going on in Chinese which isn't present in English.
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The Mahayana vs. Theravada modes of transsexualism.
In Buddhism, the two main branches of belief are Mahayana, which says that merit (i.e., the power of goodness and the energy to get beings to enlightenment) is transferable between beings, and Theravada, which says that it isn't. (Basically.) Mahayana Buddhists believe in Boddhisattvas, which are enlightened beings who choose not to go on to enlightenment so that they may stay on and help other, less fortunate beings.
Well, this whole model applies exquisitely to the main division within the transsexual "community" -- between those who want to pass, live their lives as their preferred gender and just get out of the TG mode as soon as possible, and those who want to proclaim their TS status and liberate other TS folks before they move on. I wonder, have any historical precedents been made that show a way to bridge the gap? Because I think transsexuals really need it. Of course, the Catholic/Protestant split is possibly just as relevant here, but i just don't know that much about it.
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Different types of friendships.
I've noticed that friends often seem divisible into types. There are personality friends, who you get along with because your personalities are matched; interest friends, who you share common interests (but not necessarily personalities) with and history friends, who you don't share either interests or personalities with, but with whom you have a history, a shared pile of experiences that kind of substitute for either of the other types.
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Losing friends.
I often seem to lose friends. Not through argument or difference of opinion, but through them basically disappearing off the face of the planet somehow. Recently, though, there's been a strange reversal of this trend.
Two friends I valued greatly who had disappeared subsequently reappeared. Is this karma? Luck? Laws of thermodynamics and law of averages randomly working to my favor?
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Principle vs. pragmatism
Many, many issues come down to principle -- the way things ought to be, or the prescription for life -- and pragmatism - the ways things actually are, or the description of life. This is quite closely tied into (for example) the Mahayana vs. Theravada modes of transsexuality I noted, above. Some people look at how the world is and say that it's terrible, we should try to change it. Others see that there is very little a single person, or even a lot of people, can do to change anything. So, do we accept the shitty but seemingly unbudging way things are? Or struggle fruitlessly to make headway? This is the root of many problems, and many paradigms.
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Progress towards acceptance in stages
It seems like, at least in the US, and probably in Taiwan too, cultural acceptance of new things comes in stages:
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First, people don't even acknowledge or understand that something exists.
Example: People who like to have sex with animals, in Taiwanese culture.
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Then they start to talk about it, laughing at it and/or seeing it as evil, bizarre or unacceptable.
Murderers in the US.
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Then people who are part of it start to acknowledge their own existence to themselves and come together in secret groups. Media depictions are unabashedly negative.
Marijuana users in Taiwan.
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People who are brave enough stand up for their rights and begin to talk openly about the thing. Meanwhile, the general public still laughs at it. People in the media may make careers of either being highly visible members of the group ("laughing stocks" or clowns), or out of making fun of the group.
Transgender people in Taiwan.
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People eventually start to acknowledge that it (whatever it is) isn't necessarily bad, but still view it as such at least privately, and publically, still feel comfortable making jokes about it. Media representations are nervously negative about the group -- often obviously negative depictions followed by commentary which seems to say that the depiction was not necessarily a representative sample, but which doesn't do nearly enough to contradict the overall impression left in the audience's minds.
Gay people in Taiwan, to some extent.
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As the group demands acceptance, politeness sets in. People cease to feel that public joking is acceptable, and only criticize people of the group privately, i.e., when no one of the group is around. Media depictions of the group become more polite; negative images are presented only if accompanied by positive images, allowing the producers plausible deniability.
Women in Taiwan; Gay people in the US.
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The group becomes strong enough to demand positive-only representations. Books and shows are created with people of the group as the specific targets, but, when members of the group are depicted in the media, they are almost always clearly labeled or identified as signifiers of that group, not just as people. People become comfortable with making negative depictions of members of the group; the message is that members of the group are of all sorts, even negative ones.
Women in the US; handicapped people in the US.
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If the group actually gains power, or is accepted long enough, they are able to gain recognition of their status as people without specific reference to their membership in the group. In other words, media representations of them are made with no reference to the fact that they are members of that group.
Men in the US, or anywhere for that matter.
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Complexity.
The universe is a very complicated place. There are trillions of stars, and at least some stars with planets out there. The forms of life here on Earth are amazingly various; the varieties that probably exist in the universe as a whole are probably just bogglingly huge.
All of which means that the complexities that humans must deal with on a day-to-day basis are huge. Many, many times every day, we are confronted with the complexities of existence. What kind of food to eat? Why does this food taste different than the last time I had it? Why did that car nearly hit me today when that almost never happens usually? Why does CIndy look different today?
We spend a great deal of time trying to avoid complexity. Statistics, math, business management, psychological treatment, even science as a whole -- all are ways of reducing the complexity that we have to deal with. Usually, the only people who actually try to see the universe in all its complexity are mystics and insane people.
However, we also can't just go for utter simplicity. Zen does try to do this in some ways, as do other forms of mysticism, I guess. But living in the world still requires some complexity.
Different people have different tolerance levels for complexity, and in different things. Some people can handle sexual complexity, for example. As I experience it, the vast number of possible combinations of sexual/genderal attitudes/orientations/identities is truly one of the most complicated areas of human identity. It is truly startling to go from a world in which there are two sexes, each with a single designated gender, and basically one orientation, to a world where there are infinite combinations of sexual characteristics, gender expression, orientation and all the rest. Not only is it scary, it's just really hard to deal with. There are no good words to describe people who live full-time in a different gender than the one they were born in and retain the same genitalia as the ones they had at birth, for example. ("Non-op transsexual" is something of a misnomer, if not actually an oxymoron, and "transgender" has other implications/meanings). No wonder people are scared of opening the gates of gender! When those gates are open, suddenly life becomes much more complex.
It would be easy to say, "Well, let's just encourage people to embrace complexity, then," but it's not that easy. Different people have different tolerances, and even in different areas of their lives. I know, for example, that I try to keep my sexual orientation rather cut-and-dried to avoid a lot of messiness in other areas of my life. I simply don't have time in my life to allow for complexities of modeling many people's mentalities all at the same time, either, as another example.
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Some quickies:
- The best strategy is the one that forces everyone else to change theirs.
- As long as the military keeps its conscience, the people are the ultimate arbiters.
- Strategy is not morals.
- Paranoia is in many ways the ultimate form of altruism. Many ways, but not the most important.
- Compassion means seeing others as being as good as you are. Importance is not important.
- Aesthetics can never be 100% efficient.
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Another type of friends:
To add to the above, there is one more type of friend: those who only hang out with you to avoid the social stigma of doing everything by themselves.
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Some more quickies:
- Find me something that can't be a metaphor for life.
- The hallmark of reality is that it is complex. The hallmark of humanity is that it contradicts itself.
- Two bumper-stickers I'd like to have: What is goodness? How do you know what you know?
- Anyone is interesting if you give them enough time. Being interested is the key to finding other people interesting.
- Xeno's Paradox proves that the universe must have a smallest possible piece; matter cannot be infinitely divisible into smaller bits.
- Just because something isn't original, that doesn't mean it isn't important.
- How do you solve the problem of "conforming by being a non-conformist"? Don't worry about that problem. Just worry about what's morally right, and within that, do what you want.
- There are a million ways to be wrong, but only a few ways to be right. This is part of why Internet communication tends towards flamewars. If only people had more tolerance for saying "Yes, exactly" more often...
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Additional Simple Machines:
- The Plate. Allows force directed at a point to be spread out into an area. A serving tray, washers for bolts and snowshoes are all types of Plates.
- The Knife. Opposite of the Plate; it allows force directed at an area to be concentrated into an edge.
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