ethanjscannell-blog - Tumblr blog

ethanjscannell-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Apologies, this one is going to be a bit scatter-brained. I’ve been warming myself up to using this like a genuine blog where I can just put my feelings out publicly, but I’m still getting used to it. I’m already starting to feel much better about myself, and oddly enough, more like “myself” again. By that I mean, returning to a state that is as unregulated by a superego / authority as possible.

Let me begin,

I think that the level of dishonesty that is apparent in any one person is proportional to the amount of unhappiness that the person will feel. Think of yourself as a child, carefree and enjoying the world, playing with your imagination, and having all the freedom to do whatever you wanted so long as you obeyed your parents to a degree (unless you had a shitty childhood idk).

You were free to act in a totally natural way, including in how you responded to outside stimulus and other people, etc. but over time you needed to put dampeners on those feelings because not everything you did was deemed acceptable by society. And of course not, because bla bla bla, you get it, right?

so over time you accrue augmentations to your personality by means of conditioned responses to the outside world. that’s fine. but this is also dishonest. it’s not transparent. it’s not really you at all.

but then we would all act instinctively, like animals, and end up killing and raping each other until we’re full blown tribalism.

I think there are two modes to the human personality, really... there’s the Id and the Ego, like Freud would say. Every living creature has the Id, which is desires like wanting to survive and fuck anything that moves. Even trees compete for sunlight.

But what separates us from trees, insects and animals is our possession of the Ego, in other words, consciousness. But let me make it even more simple... it’s called Emotions.

The state of humanity is therefore proportional to the amount of feelings and emotions we are free to express, which leads me to think that The Freedom of Speech is actually the only thing that matters when it comes to separating us from animals.

I listened to Jordan Peterson a lot while I was in my alt-right-ish phase. I caught wind of him through other Youtubers and started to listen to his lectures on psychology. He was a really interesting guy, not because of what he was saying exactly, but how he said it. He was giving an accurate description to things and and yet seemed to remain politically neutral on most matters. This was totally different than the other people I was listening to, take Stefan Molyneux for instance (no offense, bro. you’re still a genius).

Most importantly he was explaining political issues from both sides, as if they were both speaking a language that the other could not understand, and he could be the mediator. This was something I wished would appear in the political climate at the time, because as tensions escalated it seemed that all we needed would be someone to help each side understand the other.

Peterson had an idea that he mentions as his “message to millennials” which is something along the lines of “clean your own room before you go out and fix the world”. And while this has good merit, and perhaps will lead to some people transforming their lives, I don’t fully agree with it, in part because it’s somewhat of a criticism against people protesting against the powers that be.

Let me explain,

Peterson thinks that if we were honest in our own lives and cleared up any dishonesty between how we feel and how we act, eventually this would ripple out in small amounts. First, we would clean our room. Then, we might clean our whole house, then the whole street, then the world. While I like the idea, and like I said, it has good merit... I don’t think it’s very practical.

Why? Because it’s become incredibly hard (but not impossible) for ANYONE to survive in today’s world without living dishonestly in SOME WAY. We require the help of technology, businesses, money, and all other manner of amenities in order to earn our bread and fucking stay alive. And it’s not entirely clear whether or not these businesses are truly honest themselves.

This is why you have HUGE groups of unemployed people in protests like the Occupy movement. Sure, you may laugh and say “wow, look at them, they’re so pitiful!” But what would your alternative for them be?! To go get jobs and help perpetuate the same fucking businesses that are being dishonest to them? These people are the only ones acting honestly, and your solution would be for them to introduce dishonesty into their lives?

I sympathize, these people may be acting honestly on real feelings they have, but their actions themselves are pitiful only because they are misinformed. What they should have done (if they were smart enough to make this connection) was go through the courts to make it so each and every business would have to be 100% honest about everything that they do.

what? that’s fucking crazy! why should a business need to disclose every bit of information about who they are and what they do? how would they compete? how would they survive?

I’m glad you asked.

This is where I start to get passionate.

A business, at its most fundamental level, is a transaction between two people over goods that they own, or whatever. Over time, that business might grow to include more people performing the labor required to make the product, and through this process, the business becomes further distanced from its customers.

Who cares? Well, it wouldn’t have been so easy to sell your clay pots to Geraldo down the street if he knew you were making them with a mixture of 80% clay and 20% bullshit. But once you become a big business, those kinds of changes become necessary, apparently.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

Imagine the Google search engine when it was first created - it just searched for certain keywords and then returned some results. And it was really fucking good. So good, that you keep using it over and over until it becomes necessary to use it when you have any question.

One day they realize this and think to themselves, gee, we could make some money off this if we compromise our original values and be a little bit dishonest with people. Fuck yeah, let’s do it! So they start collecting your information, lots and lots of it, with your implied permission (why else would you be using it?!). And to this day, Google is running strong.

But what if they had been completely honest from the get go? What if they had said “we’re going to start collecting information from you because we want to sell it to other companies. Oh, and we’re going to start implementing a user interface that hijacks your dopamine pathways so that you’ll keep using our service, even though there’s no outcome to you for doing this. And there’s some other shit we won’t tell you about...”

If THIS were written explicitly in the Terms and Conditions, don’t you think some people would have slowly backed away? Don’t you think that some group of people wouldn’t have attempted to create a BETTER search engine that doesn’t include this bullshit? So tell me, how does a lack of transparency actually promote competition and innovation? I genuinely want to know.

I mentioned in my number 1 post that if I mysteriously go missing, you’ll know to investigate the government first. However, I want to edit that now.

The government isn’t the problem, per say. The problem is their inability to protect me from people who want to enslave me. Ideally, government is supposed to represent the people, and so the start to protecting us would be to stop treating businesses like people and granting them the privacy they need to be dishonest with us.

Do you think this is ridiculous? The first step to wisdom is to call things by their true name.

Why do you think that Jesus and Buddha were such monumental figures? What do they have in common?

I like to think of them both as people who were really good at seeing society in its most transparent form. They knew somehow that there was a TRUE way for people to live that was the most natural, and that society was making it impossible for some people to live that way. Jesus and Buddha are just examples of people who wanted to live as true as possible, but their approaches were quite different.

I would label Jesus’s approach as more of a Revolution approach. He saw that the Romans or whatever were ignoring the fundamental values that they claimed to live by, resulting in large groups of people suffering as peasants and outsiders. He wanted to change it, so he started revealing what the Romans were doing and, out of fear of revolution, they killed him. Woo hoo, sacrifice! The Roman empire collapsed not long afterwards, just like Jesus said it would.

The Buddha or Siddhartha or whatever you want to call him approached the truth from more of a Protest angle. Whereas Jesus wanted to change the society, Sidd decided that there was nothing he could do about it directly, so he lead by example. He attempted to rid himself of all desires such that there was nothing that society could really offer him. I think this is a less powerful approach, but it effectively does the same job of indicating that there is something wrong with society as it is.

These are obviously very simplified versions of their stories, but I did this on purpose to illustrate a connection I see with modern day society.

More and more we see people opting out either through drug use, running away, or becoming welfare basement dwellers. Why? These people have feelings which are totally legitimate and real concerns that can’t be easily answered by society. And so, interestingly, their feelings are forcing them to protest society at the cost of their own lives. Most of them cannot explain it this way, but I believe it is the truth. Modern day Buddhas.

The others are out in the streets, protesting at rallies and crying out to the people in power to be honest with everyone else. If Jesus was alive today, what do you think he’d be doing?

Anyway that’s it for now. Hopefully I don’t sound like a guy who’s too overly paranoid or someone with lots of observations but no solutions. I’ve only just started to open up about all my thoughts so there’s more to come.

As for any dishonest businesses out there reading this and thinking “oh shit”. Well repent now, lawyer up, and do whatever you gotta do, because I’ll be coming for YOU, motherfucker. And if I go missing then you know where to start.

;)

Love, me.

2 notes · View notes

ethanjscannell-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Hey, I’m feeling pretty good about this journal so far, especially since I’ve given into the idea of just speaking from my internal dialogue. The most important part is to stop worrying about what other people will think - but that’s cliche as fuck and never really “reached” me the way it should have. The proper way to think about it, I think, is to realize that you are something that is changeable, and that even if you express yourself in a way that may seem bizarre to people, it doesn’t make your feelings any less valid.

In fact, I would even go so far as to say that feelings are sometimes more valid than facts, which is something that the rest of you alt-right, scientifically minded or whatever people might cringe at.

I think your feelings indicate something that is inherently true that you can’t yet explain in words. Sometimes you’ll turn to other forms of communication instead, like art or whatever, and it may communicate your feelings better. Or sometimes you’ll find yourself completely overwhelmed with feelings, with the corollary thought that your feelings are not valid and are things that will just pass. In which case, your feelings manifest anyway, and are communicated through however you start to behave.

For instance, imagine you wake up on a Monday morning by the buzz of your alarm clock. You need to leave for work in 15 minutes, but you’re still tired and would rather lay in bed for at least another few minutes without feeling like you’re being ripped out from your own world. You silently wish to yourself that you’d like to be in a world where people didn’t have to work, where they had freedom instead to choose what they would like to do. But there are bills to pay and you don’t want to get fired so you force yourself up and leave the house 10 minutes late.

I think that feeling is valid, and reveals a deep truth that nobody wants to admit. However, most of us, after years of being told what we *should* do, lack the logic or insight necessary to make the connection, at least, in a way that can be communicated effectively. By effectively I mean, such that we acknowledge the basic problem and how we can actually fucking change it.

I’ll do my best here to communicate it, with the limited art form of language...(lol, wasn’t I already doing that?)

In the above example we have a person who’s struggling to find a reason why they should really go to work - maybe they do something boring like Accounting or Data Entry (if you’re into that, cool, imagine something else then). What I think is lacking in that person’s case is that the emotions don’t line up with the logic. For instance, if that job was something that they really believed in, that they really understood and wanted to be a part of, don’t you think that they would have an easier time getting up?

yeah but that’s fucking obvious, dude. like obviously you’ll want to do something that you’re more emotionally invested in, but the working world isn’t so accommodating like that. we need accountants and drive thru window employees or society would fucking collapse, dude.

Okay. So your answer in this case would be that people just need to “suck it up” for the benefit of society, yeah? What if they don’t care about society then?

then fuck em, man. let em die. lazy fuckers. you need to find a job and get to work, what makes you so special anyway?! you think you’re above it all? that’s what’s wrong with millennials.

Haha, idk, does this sound familiar at all? This is the common discourse I imagine most people have, and the one that I see most of all, though in many variations from the regular. Here’s the basic logic I see here:

Mainstream person encounters narrative about not wanting to work

Parrots the logic they’ve been taught or learned, like a reflex.

They get emotional (angry) and demand that the person just “accept” reality

If no, then they label them as an outlier (millennial) so that they can explain the behavior

And the two outcomes of this approach are either...

1. The non-working person submits themselves to “reality” and literally whips themselves into shape (usually not without the help of pharmaceuticals).

2. The non-working person doubles down on their stance in opposition to the working person, thus, further distancing themselves from “reality”.

I’m not one to jump to conclusions (I am, but it’s for the sake of working backwards theoretically) -- but I think that this behavior, which is something along the lines of disregarding feelings as if they are not just as valid as scientific fact, explains almost all manner of dysfunctional society. The one that pops into mind first is the drug epidemic across the country, maybe the world, idk. It makes sense to me that if you take a large group of people who are more prone to emotional thoughts / feelings and attempt to force them into your framework, they will “opt out” to the most extreme degree.

Put more simply, I think -- if you make “reality” so unbearable so that people’s feelings and emotions cannot be easily understood, they will start to doubt their own feelings. Next, they’ll become conflicted about whether their feelings represent or indicate anything objective at all. And then after that, it’s either

- disconnect from reality such that nothing can interfere with my feelings, or

- suppress my feelings so much so I can survive (because I’m dependent on society) but completely lose touch with who I am (feelings don’t match actions).

I’ll come back to this later.

Love, me.

#journal #rant #feelings

1 note · View note

ethanjscannell-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Let me clarify something on feelings.

I mentioned in my last post that (or implied, rather) that we should be free to express our feelings without worrying that they’ll come back to haunt us. I don’t think this is an arbitrary thing either, though most people would instinctively see it that way.

oh sure let’s express our feelings openly, even though they’re fickle and totally susceptible to change at a moment’s notice. that won’t go wrong, like what about mass shooters? aren’t they just expressing their feelings? if they would wait a minute then the feeling would pass and they would realize it’s just a feeling.

idk, maybe you’re right. but why would they feel so strongly about it? I don’t accept the hidden logic of the question, which is:

- some mass shooters are expressing their feelings

- therefore all, unrestrained expression of feelings will lead to mass shootings

okay, then you might say

well, if we just let people express their unrestrained feelings openly, won’t the number of mass shootings increase, at least?

And though that’s still a broad question, I’m going to lean more towards no on that one. Why? Because I think OVERALL that restricting expression will have a worse effect than unrestricting expression.

Imagine if you place a child in an environment where they are reprimanded for expressing certain thoughts and ideas, whether that be through speech, writing, crayon pictures, whatever. You tell them instead that they’re not allowed to do that or they will be punished in some way.

Okay, now..... what happened to the feelings that inspired the expression in the first place? Are they magically gone now? From the “parent / teacher / authority” perspective, yeah that child is totally fixed now (lol). But the child didn’t suddenly go into his mind, put those feelings into a box, and then erase them *finger snap* like that (TA DA, cured??). He / She just added a logical, conditional statement “on top” of that feeling that expends brain energy to move it “somewhere else”. maybe I can visualize this somehow...

I would classify this as a very high level view of what’s going on - there are obviously more intricacies that we could dive into here that would take up more time, but would get to the “base level” of the issue (which I think is the most important). By the way, https://www.draw.io/ is an awesome site / tool / whatever. Definitely going to use this more now...

But notice that in the second logic tree that the question of communicating the feeling lead to the conditioned response of “I might get punished” -- HOWEVER the feeling itself did not go away! And that’s the thing. Or my theory, rather... that feelings don’t just go away. They are like an itch that needs to be scratched (communicated, expressed) or they will manifest themselves in other, more complicated ways.

This may give more credence to an idea I’ve had recently, which is that astrological signs actually give an accurate estimate of your base nature, i.e. the intensity of emotions you feel and how you respond to them. But that’s a discussion (blog post) for another time.

Anyway, I’m kind of running out of gas here. You couldn’t see it but while I was searching for a free diagram creation thing online I had to go through like 10 sites and it was frustrating. Plus, now I feel like I’m getting emotional and need to express in a different way. Or that the government is going to find this and be like

oh shit, he’s questioning the impact of authority in a well thought out (kind of not really) way! Let’s FUCK EM UP, boys!

Yeeaahh, I think I’ve read too many conspiracy theories haha. But at least if I mysteriously die you’ll have someplace to start.

I love you. Thanks for reading.

#rant #feelings #journal

0 notes