Loop-de-Loop

When it comes to my own writing, I go through cycles; very big, long cycles, oscillations between positive and negative states—but not necessarily the states of loving and loathing that you might expect. These frustratingly cyclical feelings are entitlement and disentitlement. Ie. I vacillate between:

  1. My position is reasonable and is probably the preferable choice.

    And:

  2. I have no idea what I’m talking about and should therefore shut the fuck up.

Many feelings accompany these thoughts, though the biggest (and most obvious) is embarrassment/shame. The fun part is that this shame relates much less to whether or not I’ve made good/valid points and argued them well, and far more to the spirit in which I wrote them.

Which is to say: How I feel about my writing is measured by the extent to which I remember the mood I was in when I wrote a piece, and to what extent I think I’ve made a fool of myself for being too effusive and passionate. This basic embarrassment is fuelled by impostor syndrome (which is itself a source of embarrassment because it’s so typical of writer types).

I have a hard time challenging impostor syndrome because, naturally, there are a great many areas in which I am absolute shit. A recent part of my process of growing the fuck up has been realising the (vast) extent to which I have Dunning-Kruger’ed myself into believing that I am far better at a number of things (as a musician, or as an athelete) than I actually am.

The tricky bit is that I am actually a very capable and competent writer (and musician and athlete, when I’m in shape) but I have also spent years and years vastly overestimating my abilities.

I explain this to myself mostly as narcissistic grandiosity, ie. needing to believe that I’m better than I am and being afraid to put the practice in, for fear of discovering that I can never be as good as I wish I was.

Memory

I don’t have a narrative-declarative memory, by which I mean the kind of memory that stores dates and times and specific events. My memory works on a conceptual-associative level, meaning that I remember things because they relate to something that is happening in the moment, and usually on the basis of that happening’s abstract similarity to something I have experienced in the past: I remember x because y reminds me of it.

This is a great kind of memory for creative endeavours because it lends itself well to bullshitting and confabulation, which is the most basic possible description of fiction writing. And music is about as non-literal and abstract as you can get.

This kind of memory, however, is a poor bedfellow to academic/intellectual writing, with all of its anal-retentive focus on facts, or whatever. I am very capable of logical thought, but the logicking process doesn’t proceed syllogistically, which is to say in a linear, manner. Rather, it looks a lot more like level 100 on that sliding wood-block game that used to be free and fun but now exists in a thousand versions, all of which are just a vehicle for irritating ads.

I think most theorists also think this way, but are much better at squorshing their non-linear thoughts into the linear form of syllogistic logic.

Being-Wrong Panic

The above is why philosophy books are generally so fucking long. To make the intuitive logic intelligible to others, you have to start from the beginning and re-explain everything.

Somewhere early on in this process my head explodes with contradictions and counter-arguments and all of the various hair-splitty reasons why it’s invalid to make a particular assumption or assert a particular whatever-the-fuck.

This is where and why (I think) most people start to lean heavily on precedent and layout: post authority, because having a Nietzsche or Wittgenstein reference in your back pocket absolves me, Mr. Nobody, of daring to claim that a conclusion holds water just because it makes sense.

And I could definitely make those references, because I’ve read most of both of those guys’ work. What I can’t do, is refer to any of the mountain of literature that has been written since. So I don’t know what MacGruber (or whoever) has to say about why Nietzsche is totally wrong. In other words, I can’t anticipate the criticisms that will be levelled at me for making a particular claim and I have no similar halo-effect layout: post authority to pull out of my ass to counter the criticism with.

So I don’t try.

Or I Do, But Then Feel Bad About It

But then I go back and read a post on the one about how capitalistic power-structures are in fact eerily similar to facism, so similar that you might think they were actually the same system rebranded—I go back and read it and it’s very cogently argued, although it relies almost entirely on a single Wikipedia article.

Which is the perfect example

Right? I haven’t read any of the primary (or secondary, for that matter) sources, and so what I’m doing is taking the basic ideas of fascism and the modern corporation, comparing them, and pointing out how they look kinda similar (cough, cough, the same). And that’s it, more or less. Personally, I don’t need any more than that. The modern corporation embodies nearly every characteristic of a fascist dictatorship, and yet I’ve never heard anyone make that comparison before.

But I worry that there’s some dimension of the argument that has been invisible to me, and that someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is going to pop up from behind the bar and be like: man, you dumb.

So, what you’re telling me, is that I’m over-thinking this like way a lot?

Pretty much.