Straight outta the little notebook I keep in my pocket, here are four indirectly related thoughts that have come to me over the past week. Each of them seems to have some sort of deeper meaning, some long tentacles that it reaches into all the corners of the Earth like a particularly abstract hentai, but honestly, I’m unsure what those deeper meanings are. What do y’all think?
1. This linguistics major I’ve done is mostly spooks.
Sure, there are rules that govern how language works, but those are of distant secondary importance: All the important things we do with words, we do as individuals, and no word means the same thing to any two people: The meaning of any given word (or any symbol in general) is just the collected history of it to you, the one who speaks it.
Which means both that the whole field of semantics is doomed, and that a flag that to you is racist can to someone else be a totally innocuous sign of heritage, and neither of you is entitled to say the other is wrong unless you’re going to claim that entitlement by force.
2. The most dangerous thing we can do with past calamity is to sensationalize it.
Example of form: “Early 20th century fascism was terrible, and dramatically so: The Holocaust! Kristallnacht! Totalitarianism! If anything like that happened today, we’d totally notice, and we’d revolt for sure.” The problem is that no mass extinction, no Ukrainian famine, no police massacre pops up overnight.
By sensationalizing past catastrophes and focusing only on their endpoints rather than the snail-slow processes that led to those endpoints, we pretty much guarantee that when similar things happen now, we’ll ignore them until it’s too late.
It’s the subtle things that matter: Each acquittal of a police officer who’s murdered a black man (too many to link), each election we absurdly think is “democratic,” each outrage over speech crime or thought crime, and every day of industrial production brings us closer to whatever it is our grandkids will say we should’ve seen coming.
3. Why do people care about the aesthetics of their underwear?
If no one’s gonna see them, they’re effectively non-existent, but on the other hand, if I anticipate that someone will see them, that means I anticipate that someone will see them for maybe a minute or two, max. And if I’m just chillin’ with somebody in my undies, we’re probably on a level where we don’t care about the aesthetic of each other’s underwear anyway.
But maybe there’s a whole subculture, to which I’m naïvely ignorant, in which underwear-aesthetics plays a role that for me is unimaginable.
4. Selfishness leads inevitably to altruism.
Rather, self-consistent selfishness leads to altruism. Look down at yourself: You can’t see all of you at once. Yet you (likely) don’t think of yourself as a disjointed series of fragments, though that is the only way you can see yourself. You have a name, you can say “I,” and those things mean a single and whole person. So you must take some significant aspects of the way you think of yourself from the people around you, the ones who actually can see all parts of you at once.
If you want to have a good relationship to yourself, then, you’ve got to treat those around you well, because they dictate large parts of the way you relate to yourself. Being good to yourself requires that you’re good to your homies.
As I said in the title, these thoughts are incomplete. The purpose of this is to get conversations started: Send me your thoughts, your rants, your contingent agreements. I'd like to figure out the profundity which surely lies beneath each of these thoughts, and hopefully it’ll be mutually beneficial to us to talk about them, be it in person or via Facebook comments.
