The tendency is to expect consistency, that is, my opinion once formulated, once expressed, ought never to change. It shall be as diamond, imperturbable and indifferent to the friction of either time or mood.

This neither sane nor reasonable, but since when are one’s unconscious expectations sane or reasonable? The definitions contradict.

So, here I am, in the middle, pulled between impossible positions. But have haven’t articulated the opposing pole yet, have I?

The opposite to perfect stasis is continual change, equally frustrating, equally impossible. This is not a state in which one can exist.

Chaos without form is death, just as form without change is death. In the middle is the frustrating position of consistency, I suppose. Changeable and yet reliable, unpredictable and yet predictable.

Layers

Do my opinions change or does my feeling towards my opinions change?

I think some art is good and some is bad, and though I admit that my position is necessarily skewed, it feels as though there must be some sort of rubric, some minimally-accurate scale on which we can measure the arty-ness of an object. I don’t want to get into that argument again, but that is the basic position.

Capitalism is despotism rationalised through economic theory, just as fascism is despotism rationalised through political theory. That is my opinion, point and period.

But do I feel safe in asserting these things? How much coffee have I had? How articulate is the person presenting the opposing argument? How rational, how cogent, how able to include the whole of the question’s context?

It’s The Latter

Of course it is. Of course it’s how entitled I feel to make a particular claim, or any claim at all. I do not feel entitled to do this, why? Let me count the ways.

  1. My knowledge on any given subject is woefully incomplete.
  2. My intellectual interest in the question is pretty superficial.
  3. My impulse to express a given opinion is usually an angry response to someone saying something that I think is stupid or harmful.
  4. I personally don’t feel compelled to share knowledge, explain, teach, or any of those things.
  5. My opinions are formed mostly in my solipsistic echo-chamber of a mind, which is to say that pretty much the whole of my argument rests on: “Well, if you think about it, it’s obvious that…”
  6. I am afraid of being wrong.
  7. I am afraid of being shown that I am wrong.
  8. &tc.

Logic Schmlogic

There is a difference, too, between being logical and being pedantic, and the one seems often to be mistaken for the other.

I don’t know how to communicate or argue against pedantry because it is motivated by a different energy than mine. I don’t particularly care about precision and I do not feel that conceptual mistakes have any real-world meaning.

Meanings change, minds change, new information appears, things move around. The pedant’s deepest desire is to prevent this, to freeze spacetime into a fixed, immovable, and above all predictable form.

I am all about good enough. Metaphors and analogies, creative comparisons and unexpected connections and similarities. The importance of what a thing is is only in so far as it gives me a concrete enough reference point to make sense of it by way of analogy to something else.

Well, That’s Unexpected

I think I’m about to say that what I’m really interested in is the essences of things. Fallout 4 is essentially a remake of Fallout 3, even though the details are different enough to obscure this fact. The fact that they differ in a number of (important) ways is irrelevant to the basic argument: Fallout 4 was made by greedy capitalists capitalising on the modern business strategy of pandering to audiences stupefied by nostalgia and escapism. And: because they are caught up in this nostalgia, the people who like Fallout 4 don’t actually see the game for what it is; they are caught up in their joy of being able to play Fallout 3 again, to the point that they do not see that they’re being manipulated and taken advantage of. So when they play Fallout 4, they are cosplaying themselves from 2008 playing Fallout 3 for the first time; ie. pretending that the thing they’re actually doing is identical to the thing they wish they were doing, when it obviously and categorically is not.

Yeah, but…

Ultimately, I don’t engage with questions logically, rather I use logic to support the conclusion I have come to based on intuition.

There are vanishingly few people who don’t do this. Science itself is full of people so fully locked into their reality-tunnels that they cannot see how they are skewing results, or interpreting accurate results in a way that doesn’t contradict what they believe must be true.

Articulating an argument in written form activates the basic fear that by doing so, I am exposing my views to challenge. In having them challenged, I will be forced to change them on the basis of logic/reason/&tc. I don’t want to change my opinions because it is important to the maintenance of my reality tunnel that the structures I have created for myself remain solid and predictable.

You’re Contradicting Yourself

Of course I am. Chaos and stasis are equally tolerable as long as they serve my emotional needs.

It might be better, actually, to think of chaos and stasis as tools that I use to form the world into the shape I need it to take. Or better put, my perception of chaos and stasis is the tool I use to shape the world the way I want it to be shaped.

In other words, I put effort into logical argument when I want things to be a particular way, but then become chaotic (ie. associative and confabulatory) when the established stasis constricts or forces me to think or behave in a way that doesn’t suit me.

In other words, I use the tools of creativity and pedantry in different places and depending on context, but always to the end of protecting my narcissistic, solipsistic, self-created reality in which everything makes perfect sense to me and is therefore true.

Welcome to the Human Race

Phew.

I am human after all.