Feeling Invisible

Everyone feels invisible to someone at some time. It’s part and parcel of the human condition.

But the path to becoming visible doesn’t go through other people. It goes through the agency and the autonomy a person gets for themselves.

And then it continues, secondly, by negotiating with other people in the world who typically have their own emotional and psychological events going on in their heads.

Autonomy and agency don’t come from the presence of external markers or via external validation from other, equally flawed, people. Autonomy and agency are confirmed by external markers second.

Eliminating invisibility always begins with the hard work people must do internally.

And if a person’s internal north star is pointed in any direction other than at the highest, most transcendent reality, there’s going to be inevitable trouble, confusion, chaos, trauma, and despair in achieving such internal visibility to themselves first.

It’s part and parcel of the human condition.

Under Pressure

Pressure is a valuable state. It focuses and sharpens concentration, creates friction inside an experience, and it encourages the growth of resilience under stress.

Pressure creates diamonds along with heat and time in the geologic realm. In the psychological realm, pressure creates stress and trauma, along with emotional heat.

Pathologizing stress into trauma and encouraging avoidance of pressure rather than acceptance of the fact of pressure leads to creating not diamonds, but pieces of coal with stress fractures that, when heat is applied, burn and fade.

Anonymous Verification

The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”

He was right, of course.

And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.

The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.

People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.

The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.

I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.

The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.

And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.

Knowing the Path

We can know objective truth, and we can defend it. . We can’t know people’s feelings about objective truth. So, we have a moral responsibility to put those subjective feelings in their appropriate place, and behave sincerely and with principle, while walking out objective truth.

Unreliable Narrators

Now that we all live in a culture where most (if not many) objective truths have been reduced to subjective feelings, we navigate a globalized environment where we are all a species of unreliable narrators.

Sure, we can “know” people relationally and determine the reliability of their closely-held narratives, but increasingly even that is becoming a problem at the localized level, which is the level most of us still live at.

Another, simpler way of putting this is, we are all liars. And in a world full of liars, the most dangerous and courageous person is the one who insists, despite the conditions surrounding them, that 1). there is objective truth, 2). humans, no matter their background, education, or temperament, can know what that truth is, and 3). that subjective feelings about objective truths represent the beginnings of rebellion against the order of reality itself.

It’s no wonder that unreliable narrators–what we used to call liars–are proliferating faster than we can address their lies. The problem, dear Horatio, lies in us, not in the stars.

Secret Kings and Their Marketing Teams

No one is convinced that the social reformer, regardless of ideological, political, or social position, is advocating for all of the “social reform” they’re advocating for, out of some sense of humane magnanimity.

Just as no one is convinced that the businessman, regardless of commitment to sales, investing, or making profit, is advocating for all of the “capitalism” they’re selling and marketing for, out of some desire to destroy, despoil, or ruin.

However, because creatives tend to be socially minded rather than business-minded, they tend to get the last word in describing, defining, and making the myths that the audience believes about not only their motives, but also the motives of their opposites.

Olestra, GLP-1's, Nietzsche, and the Continued Search for a Chemical Solution to Human Nature

Two things occur to me:

1). People in online popular culture no longer talk about “body positivity” now that GLP-1 drugs are readily available and have proven to be somewhat effective. However, I remember the coming and going of Olestra, so I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

2). There is never going to be a chemical solution to the pile of psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors that cause the differing disorders, pathologies, habits, tendencies, and tics that humans experience as a result of living in a fallen world.

Of course, I am trade-off positive rather than solution positive, because the abyss of human nature is as deep and dark as the abyss Nietzsche rhapsodized about in his various mad warnings.

Absurdity

Sure, the social interactions between people, between people and institutions, and between institutions themselves are absurd.

But pointing out the absurdity doesn’t mean that you’ve solved the problem. It doesn’t even mean you’ve accurately identified the place of trade-off and negotiation. It means you’ve observed like a child, using adult terms to describe your observations, and have decided that serious effort to address absurdity just isn’t in your emotional or intellectual makeup.

Pointing out absurdity is nothing. Presenting the trade-offs as alternatives to absurdity is everything.

Warfare, Terror, Murder & Bloodshed

“…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock…” - Orson Welles, The Third Man