You know what I think is fascinating?

Sometimes I'll start writing these articles and I have no idea what'll come out. Ok, I do that most of the time. The finished product reveals itself when the product is finished. I'll just meet it there when we both arrive at 3000-something words.

So today, I've decided to take my I-start-with-nothing-and-end-up-with-something philosophy to new heights. I'm writing an article with nothing deliberately in mind. This exercise is to put to paper (or not, haha--computers) the unedited thought process of myself at a time I felt mentally active (I'm feeling pretty mentally active). Here I am, and I'll just see where this goes. Hope you join along. Feel free to psychoanalyze the 'random.'

I guess the first thing that's on my mind is that I really hate a lot of the cowardice and mediocrity that I see encouraged among people my age by people my age--I'm 18.

Living with people my age, I see how we interact, I see we know most of us can do better, but I also see everyone is too scared to call everyone else out on their idiocy or their lukewarm effort. No, I don't think the four-hour study session comprised of 2 hour vine compilations, half an hour of sex talk, and a twenty minute munchie break is a productive use of time. Yet we call it so.

(This is for the introverts who have time in their pocket).

In my rhetoric class, I noticed very early on that my professor wanted to encourage a casual, welcoming environment. (I also despise that we've created a culture where "comfort" is what is welcoming. The reason for that is because as a result of the neutering of our culture, we've ceased to learn. Nothing is challenging because we don't want to make people think. Everything is "great." It's like we're children walking into a kindergarten class.) There is nothing wrong with casual professors. However, I see where it takes the kids--sorry, I mean the students.

Slowly but surely, students began to act like kids in the class. The professor doesn't grade homework, so naturally, nobody does it. And nobody calls anybody else out on it! Ask someone, "Hey did you do the homework?"--the most likely response you'll get it "we had homework?" It's clear that if we're given the opportunity to be less than what we can be, we'll take it if our character is weak. Everyone get's their D's and C's on essays and they wonder where their effort went. They didn't have any damn effort to begin with.

I once woke up from a dream where I was talking with a bear, and as I awoke, I asked myself "are you happy with how happy you are?"

Every day I walk into class with one wish: that the homework would actually be checked. (If my third-grade self could hear this now!) I walk into class, knowing almost nobody else did the homework, and wish that we would spontaneously and suddenly be held accountable for our homework. I imagine the teacher going around collecting worksheets or checking essay progress and as everyone's failed nothingness is exposed, I laugh. How I laugh. But of course, it never happens, the kids don't learn because they're not pushed to, and by the end of the semester they'll have spent two hundred dollars three days a week for seventeen weeks on feeling like a child. There is no accountability, therefore, the kids don't grow. How I laugh.

I actually blame that on the professor. I've noticed a consistent occurrence in the classrooms of the professors who treat their students like children--the students act like children. For maturity's fucking sake, a girl gave a presentation on a hobby of hers (she chose pen-making, which is pretty unique and interesting, really!), but the first line that came out of her mouth was "ok I didn't know what to fucking do this on so I just chose something I've done for a really long time." This wasn't in some resentful manner. She went up to the front of the class with a big ol' barbarian smile and let the good ol' fuck out once she knew discipline wouldn't follow.

And we all moved on! Now I understand some people reading this might not take an issue with the specific word--fuck, yes I'm aware--she said, and would argue that it's an expression of true emotion or whatever excuse you can conjure up for an utter lack of professionalism--not even professionalism, maturity. For fuck's sake, you're in a classroom. (If you're mad, take issue with it!)

I think the conclusion of this thought is that I'm upset at where classrooms have gone. From at least half of my professors I've noticed more attention is paid to making sure the classroom is ideologically safe (although of course that means taking into account all leftist bias--who else is to complain? Not that complaining is bad, but that there is a class of students known for complaining. Unless people are taking away guns, kneeling at the flag, or defending abortion, you can guess who it is! So really the room is an anti-Trump-conservatives-are-stupid-old-white-men-and-we're-virtuous-genuises safe haven) and child-like. If the necessity for learning is to treat us like grade-schoolers (which hinders actual learning), perhaps everyone has a little bit more learning to do before they come to university.

Out of the classroom though, I get so sad being around the boys I know. I know plenty of driven, hard-working females, and I think that's great. Whatever has happened to young men though is sad, reprehensible, and regrettable to say theleast. Most boys I know don't care about themselves or their classes, they drink when the opportunity is presented, smoke until two in the morning, and are encouraged by everyone around them to wear the mask until the dance kills them.

(And it's funny because I say this after looking at what they do. We say certain things, we do others. We do certain things--and I believe we believe what we do. Something almost irreconcilable about our nature is that we're able to lie to our own person. I will stop doing this. I will do some more of that. The intention is no less real! But no less real is it's betrayal. So what are we then? Are we the belief? Are we the intention? Well, look at yourself. You are what you do.)

Most boys I know compete in the sexual hierarchy--although I've noticed the massive assault on this as well, but I'm not too worried about it's eradication, unless I'm reading you wrong--which is needed and necessary but they avoid many other domains of competence. I think the sexual hierarchy--akin to the dominance hierarchy but only in terms of mating criteria--is the most natural one we have and the most long-lasting because if it wasn't real we wouldn't be alive. (To give a distopian sample, one of the things that makes Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World so interesting--and terrifying--is that within it, the society encourages nobody to prefer one person over another, so nobody has any discriminatory thoughts about sexual selection. Nobody falls in love, now isn't that so sad? Think about it though. Falling in love is choosing to see one person as worthy of trust and care even though they're just as terrible as everyone else--and that process is BEAUTIFUL.)

If I was a dog, what language would I think in?

What I find so funny is that there are women who are attracted to the kinds of men who are at the very top of the hierarchy--I've known a few--who are incredibly sexually kinky, provocative, and deviant behind closed doors. Hey, we all like the daddy-this-baby-that talk, I don't take issue with that. Buy a hundred pieces of lingerie. But what I think is so funny is that a lot of the women I see who are trying their hardest to "destroy the patriarchy" and "uproot sexism" are the same women who select men for sexual interactions with the harshest sexual selection criteria. What the harshest criteria actually produces is a selection of only the tallest, strongest, most dominant, most desirable men. And is that not incredibly discriminatory and unequal?!?! Well, I say good! Like teachers who never check homework, the sex that chooses not to keep the other in check will degenerate those they interact with.

Think about having sex with those guys, you think they're gonna be some wimpy bug who can't throw you around or pull your hair? You think those guys won't wake up with claw marks on their back? You think they care--or let bother--what the four women staring them down as they walk across the field think? You think they know how to be judged? I'll tell you now, their ignorance has betrayed them, and everyday prolongs the dreadful realization of a man past his prime's regret of not figuring out that fate handed him good cards, and the hand is over. (But while their getting is good...) You tell me, are they not evidence all men are not equal?

So is the conclusion I'm drawing not obvious? The more you scream for equity, equality, empowerment for yourself, the more you desire the very opposite... in some other manner. (Of course, I'm not saying we shouldn't uproot unnecessary inequality. Don't feed your bias with such subconsciously desirable conclusions.) And if you've made your entire public life--because liars live in the eyes of other people--a display of what an equitable and non-offensive person you are, what do you think your sexual life is going to look like? It's going to be a playground of NASTY desires for submission and dominance and INEQUALITY played out in good fun. C'mon, can't we have some fun?

A little bit of inequality is necessary--the only equalizers are revolution and massive-scale war. Tell me, how well have those usually worked out?

YOU CAN'T GET RID OF THE BUTTONS YOUR ANCESTORS DIDN'T DECIDE TO BE BORN WITH.

Back to these wimpslops. Some of them work hard, no doubt--don't get that wrong. But where we can use a little bit of help are with those areas that just attack the soul of these guys! I don't know what it is. They seem so lacking in motivation to do anything. They're all business, economics, accounting, etc. majors and it seems they're there for the sake of having a major.

I will say, I do think we've neutered masculinity as a culture. I don't think we understand what we need from it, and the reason for that is coupled with the fact that we don't know what we need from femininity either. (But then rebound to what I said earlier about how the desirability for proper masculine-feminine interactions still exist within those who desire a tear-down of [what they think is] a system that propagated them. Animals have hierarchies and inequality. We're animals. You really think you're going to wipe away your biological nature--and do you really think you should!?--within the course of a few generations?) And how can we place such demand on ourselves?

Understanding masculinity and femininity is hard enough, but the added fact that presented solutions usually begin with an emotional negation of what is their very narrow view of the contemporary ideas--usually the most radical of their opposite--we discern more of a motivation to provide an ideological slap-in-the-face than a helpful and debate-welcoming argument. We run away from problems screaming. The antidote to ignorance is a question. Identifying igorance, then, is a process that begins and ends in looking for those who won't let challenge exist.

I've been writing for about fifteen minutes now. Allow me to recoil for a minute. Please, forgive this article for having no structure and not going in depth on any one idea. What I am aiming at in part is to showcase the randomness of the mind--what calls you forth. This is what some people think of when they're falling asleep in philosophy class. It seems interests pop up without us deciding what they are.

2008 was 10 years ago. 2028 is 10 years in the future.

Before I move on I want to address what I said about people falling asleep in philosophy. I actually think that is the saddest thing about young people today. Sure, ideas are NOT FOR EVERYONE. That is why some people don't like when certain people come to their campus--because it challenges them to think. But we tell everyone that they can be a genius because we want to be nice. Heres something, if we were all geniuses, none of us would be. What makes a genius is not just that they're smart, but that they're smarter than most others. Back to the dreamers in philosophy--they're the ones talking. Back to the sleepers, they're the ones who scare and bore and warn and show the dreamers what not to be.

I think the first thing one can discern from the kind of person who falls asleep in philosophy--if they aren't incredibly exhausted from the night before (which they could've--in most cases--anticipated), or have some other excuse--is that that person doesn't understand what philosophy is. It's not merely "learning." (What a word. It means the world. All that it is to be humankind is in learning). It's taking everything you know to be true--everything your heart holds dear to you--and saying "this might be wrong, great thinkers have thought it through, and I have the opportunity to shape my character at the highest level of resolution and detail within the next hour and forty five minutes." I guess the boy who spilled green tea (relaxing eh? doing a lot of thinking?) on my shoes as he fell asleep and crossed his arms didn't get the memo about character rearrangements.

If I live to be one hundred and two months old, I'll have existed within three centuries.

Back to our non-existent topic. Because it is unknown what you'll think of next--even within arithmetical processes, because you can get wrong answers--it seems interests, thoughts, desires happen to us. Now that's interesting to think about. There is something else to keep in mind, if that were solely the case, that our thoughts came randomly, we'd all have random thoughts, we'd all be random people, and we'd likely be very similar and the same if we were controlled by random mental processes.

So I guess what I'm interested in here--what I'm trying to get to the core of--is that we set ourselves up to have some sort of "preset" way of reacting to things that is very vague and not defined specifically. The specificity with which our thoughts come about are likely what is random. If you are a violent person, and I asked you what you'd do to someone who was irritating you even after you asked them to stop, we could say that before we asked the person this question that with certainty it would be a violent response. But what specific violent action they'll decide on, who knows until the moment they answer--or carry it out, hahaha--I don't know.

An easier way to understand this can be with music. People have taste, but they don't know where their taste will take them. I like X genre, but I don't know which songs of X genre I will listen to tomorrow if I went out to discover new music.

I'm bored of this now.

If everyone took care of themselves, nobody would have a problem. Of course though, some people cause problems in other people's lives, some need help from other people, and some just can't help but being around other people and entangling their most private or public matters with others. Damn, my introverted nature is disappointed once again.

I think, to go back to the censorship and the neutered nature of our culture, one of the funniest things in the world is where the honesty lies. It's always in comedy that we make jokes about things we shouldn't--and it's in knowing that that we're able to notice the things we've been taught to put in the "don't joke or think or learn or talk about that" category. For example, I can't help but notice that the place I've heard the most amount of discourse about the horrors of communism and socialist history--aside from Jordan Peterson videos--is within the deep, underground, incredibly offensive and monumentally hilarious meme community. I've seen memes about dekulakization, the displacement of productive workers, the murdering of landlords and factory owners, all things that I never learned in school.

That is, until I took an East Asian History course here at university and learned of Mao's malevolence. We didn't learn (there's that word again) about the death camps and slaves, but family members killing family members because they owned land and exposing Mao's "compassionate" character to be the murderous, ignorant, impatient, childish nature that it was felt pretty good.

But is it not so funny that the meme community is where this historically relevant discourse occurs? We've screamed out any notion that socialist thought is not okay. Screaming, however, and Women's marches, don't do a lot of convincing. I have nothing too great against the people who march or protest, but I do think it would help them if they knew that it doesn't necessarily do a lot of convincing. In fact I think it does the opposite, and maybe someone needs to say this for communication, persuasion, and progress to actually occur.

I'll tell you now how these things go. The march happens, the people are upset, they make each other feel good by reassuring each other that they live amongst good people--and then they forget. Yeah, they kinda just go back to smoking and drinking and skipping class and being normal everyday boring sorta awkward--THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE--person.

The dark side of Instagram is not where education about Soviet Russia belongs. It belongs on the front page of a Bernie supporter's hammer and sickle sicked mind. Not that they're all socialists. But if you're willing to make excuses for it, you either don't know the psychological implications for it, or you're choosing to act like you don't. Or you think you're some benevolent angel who'll be honest, with the largest lack of corruption in your bones that the world has seen. Bad news, even if you are the pope, I guarantee you'll have Guavara, Pot, Chavez, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, and yes, EVEN DONALD TRUMP waiting to stab you in the back to take everything. (Remember, revolutions equalize everything. Equally.. poor, miserable, and starving.)

I guess this is as good a place to stop as any (I always end by remembering who and what ruined my home country, but Marx is on my desk anyway). The message is this: don't stop thinking, and let your thoughts take you where they will.

Thinking is your gift, thinking is what makes you the animal you are. Lions have fields. Birds have the sky. Fish have the ocean we haven't seen. Humans have been given a world for a head. You shouldn't get so bored with yourself.