Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Monday, October 11, 2021

Questions from elsewhere Pt 1: Does an effective value system facilitate development of integrity?

Is it true or false that establishing an effective value system will pave the way for the development of your integrity?

This makes it smack of artifice, which is not necessarily apt.

Can we define “system” very, very loosely?

If so, then it is:

True.

But what I mean by that could be made more clear. An illustration is indicated.


Example of “value system”

  1. One goes through life finding and valuing good in experience.
    1. This “good” is of all kinds. “Moral good,” sure - catch as catch can! However, good of use, good of advantage, good of pleasure or enjoyment or satisfaction, or anything otherwise found and known desirable swings and weighs heavy in the mix. We rate and weigh these different types differently.

      this is Values.
  2. As one goes, one notes values are not all of equal weight or charge. We rank and order them by importance.
    1. This is hardly an operation that requires thought. It is stimulus and observation of variegated response. Thought can be put in, too, on top.

      these are Priorities.
  3. As one goes, one notes which things tend:
    1. …to create, enable, support, protect found good.
      1. When the thing is an action, these acts are called “right.”
      2. Where the thing is a condition or element or other factor present, we merely regard them as propitious. Perhaps each a good in its own right! Yeah! (We trust ourselves to prioritize)
    2. …to risk, harm, diminish, destroy found good.
      1. When the thing is an action, these acts are called “WRONG.”
      2. Where it is a condition, element, factor present, we mark them as hazards or similar. Watch out. Or: oppose! Root out! Circumvent! Such WRONG CONDITIONS may find themselves at RISK of HARM, DIMINISHMENT & DESTRUCTION when we spot them! RIGHT-ON!

        For it is not destruction, but what is destroyed that makes for telling right from wrong. And in these stakes, it is all about the good. Which good, too - and how much we know it’s all worth.
    3. Our inchoate attempts to apply these sensed (or imparted via rote to-do/to-don’t lists) guidance and decision aids prove probably laughably bad. We have to gain in moral judgment by ownership of and examination of consequence. Outcomes, traced back down causality to our part, for inspection, identification of fault (if any), rectification, and reason back up to reconciliation throughout the system in tipoffs, hints and self-allegations of implications to ramify. Reason back up from rectified flaw spotting all parts that flaw touched. Popping out misfit modules, clicking in upgrades - reasoning out from each such point to where that flaw touched. It’s not work, unless you call artwork work. It is recreation. Re-creation. Remaking, and it’s good of use and pleasure to boot.

      For while truth never conflicts with truth (a thing cannot be both truth and untrue in the same time, place and sense), goods can be in competition. Goods may conflict. In the event, to choose one good precludes or may preclude others. Moral judgment gains in aim, grasp of values and priorities deepens and strengthens, as we drink in the cleansing and effervescent ever-flowing beverage of our consequence of being.

      Advantage ours: the more we take in, take on, take apart and own. Consequence of all acts, inaction, decision, indecision, speech. All consequence, whether unintended or deliberate, whether foreseen, unforeseen, unforeseeable. In taking on and owning it all, we grow into and know our own part all the harder, sharper, brighter and softer! What was once unforeseeable glints to foreseen, and we deliberately avert course, change our aim to glide by without setting off a chain, chain, chain of woe. Aimed intent lengthens by kilometers and contracts at need to pinpoints. Dang-on.

      this is conscience. It is nothing but the faculty of judgment exercised in the moral dimension.
  4. And all throughout we have a rollicking ride of nature - human, ours - to contend with. So we amplify and civilize, go wilder as we grow wiser, all by turns, each by our own lights:
    1. We feed and strengthen the drives that do us right, and they become more prominent, sure and acute. Instinct drives forward into intuition as the sensory end of the driveshaft swells, and grows rational and irrational antennae.
    2. We starve and neglect the drives that do us wrong. We do not OPPOSE THEM. All resistant, denial-based energy we pour down them strengthens them. They GROW.
      1. No. We pour that energy down better, chosen and aimed channels and the drives that do us wrong atrophy and shrink. They never go away or die. They revert, birdlike and featherless to naked hatchlings high up a nest, whose cheeping and peeping are powerless as velleity. You almost wince in compassion, hearing/feeling that lil’ pipsqueak plaint to do yourself bad! But you smile and laugh. It’s only you, and you’ve wisely grown so weak in such ways, they shan’t ever fly.

        this is integrity.

        Integrity
        (our stated aim, here, though there’s tons other good to pick up on the way) is merely self-consistency. As one wag put it, “Honor is two things only: 1, know thyself. 2, never betray that.” Integrity’s just honor with the fancy dress off, and perhaps a stick or two removed from its sweet ass.

        But integrity’s coherence depends how deep down it goes. Ideally rooted sure in a coherence core of well-known full-grown deeply-held values & priorities, whose radiant penumbra and emanation brighten right in view, and throw shade on wrong.

Merely as an example.

You can see how a system like that would make it a piece of cake to develop, and even ramify, elaborate and elucidate integrity. A piece of cakewalk - and don’t mind the icing on those roughshod high-gloss spit-shined steel-toed sh!tkicker workboots you’ve grown into, at some well-missed point during all this dance!

You know.

I must cop to being a bit foolish, here. At first you spoke of system, and I was like “SYSTEM! PAH! IT DON’T TAKE ALL THAT! It flows in natural nested dovetailing of splendidly-dependent and radiant parts in sensible, even reasonable relation! It just happens.

Yes, well, so it does. But as I teased it out up there in steps…that thing IS a system.

Well, so is one’s heart plus all attendant vessels.

And so is one’s brain, plus all attendant nerves.

So yes.

A system like those two is essential. BOTH are needed. And a system like I laid out exemplar-style, as an example - that’s simply the natural outgrowth of those two, fed at need or want by eyes, ears, skin, tongue and…the other one. Nose. And it unfolds into place in a process of progress untamed and undesigned, mostly, with a bit of constant-gardener action throughout, in thoughtful pruning here and there as the whole thing - it does not tame, no - it trains.

The system trains itself, and you with it. And you grow yourself, with system well-schooled and unruly in your train.

So yeah. The answer is:

True.


There is a considerable profusion and embarrassment of other systems available.

“Try mine!” I pointedly do not say.

“Use your judgment not mine,” I say.

The system I outline is rightly called a consciention (or “consciension”) system. It’s purposeful aim: to do all that is right and necessary to the case, case-by-case, catch-as-catch can. Naturally spotting wrongs is a given, pfft. Avoid or oppose or destroy those, they are neither right nor necessary.

There is also the flip-pole of conscientious: scrupulous. Here the emphasis is on BAM. STOP. EYES WISE for bad and wrong, and DON’T.

Neither way is more childish. Either way serves. Each ways top aim trails the other’s bottom in its wake, and is not necessarily neglectful of it, it’s just not the focus.

The system you find or make to embrace suits your strengths and weaknesses to a “T,” ideally: to feed grow and train the former to better and farther aim. To stunt and whup and disdain the latter like the mutt-mongrel inobedient domestically and hunter-gatherly USELESS nondogs they are, only perhaps gentle it up a bit.

To find what suits is the key to unlocking all your coping, thriving and defense mechanisms (most of them taken off the shelf at Culture Nurture Mart) and disassemble, upgrade and weaponize them - preferably in a nonviolent way, but you get the idea. Hard, horrible world betimes we’ve got to stride with feet or roll upon, fly or set sail over with device. It takes strong kung fu to walk this world without armor and armament.

Well, you’ve got some in you. Integrity is its mastery.

Mastery is effortless aim to whatever end’s desired, in one’s chosen field.

Let yours be life.


Morality is any concern in right and wrong, to tell between in order to further right or oppose wrong.

Morality’s deepest, highest aim has always been self-control. For it’s always been we, each individually, who have to find, cobble, design or practice to discipline (rising towards mastery) such aids and guidance.

Self-control doesn’t work on others.

Self-control is made in two main parts: self-restraint, and self-aim.

Some do it all one way. Some do it all the other. Most rock an interesting mix.

I am an original, unscrupulous but highly conscientious unprincipled moralist.

A value system is one way to get to integrity intact! There are probably others I haven’t properly noticed or known. These things are clearest on the inward glance, if you care to look. Another’s is harder to judge.

Cheers.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Thought of the day: janitors

I feel as though in some ways, the janitor is the butler's modern urban soul-brother.

In any English-style drawing-room armchair whodunit set in a modern-era public school, the cliche would become: the janitor did it.

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

The power of positive wait what

Don't think "There's somebody out there for me." Think "I'M somebody out there for somebody!"

Monday, July 05, 2021

Friday, July 02, 2021

Okay, I’m off the fence: “Shoot To Thrill” by AC/DC is a pretty great song.

I remember when I first heard it, nah, second heard it (because it was after the first full listen-through*) I was like, “This is the weakest song on the album.” To be fair: the album was Back In Black. Even still.

*If it’d been the first time I’d heard it, that would’ve been pretty impetuous. It’s the second track!

Even still.

I can’t tell you how many concerts I’d go to and the band (usually AC/DC) would play “Shoot To Thrill,” and I’d be like - again? Then I’d be like, “It’s the crowd’s fault. Stop encouraging them you guys. Save your cheers!” Save your berserk revelry - it’s only “Shoot To Thrill”! Later (it kept happening!) I was like, “It’s because it’s a song from Back In Black. A case of great-by-association, clearly. They’re cheering the idea of the band playing songs from that album.” Which I could get into. Great album.

Much later, when they put it in that Iron Man movie (2, I think), I was like you assholes. WHY?

So many better songs to choose for this. Why not Live Wire? Flick Of The Switch? Heatseeker? Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap?

Big Balls?

Whatever. Shoot to thrill, Tony. I mean it fit pretty well, as used.

After that something in me broke down. I figured “There’s something in this song people actually like on merit. Shoot To Thrill qua Shoot To Thrill.” I’m not ashamed to say I knuckled down a bit. Read some modern philosophy. Found out about qualia. I mean, I already know about qualia, but it had never occurred to me…perhaps this was the key?

Every time the song came on after that, I gave it a chance. Then just now (after about five further years of openness), suddenly I realized the song was on in the background, and it had just shifted into full gear for the first verse, and I without consciously noticing was totally on board - off and away!

I had been rockin’.

So I let it roll. By the guitar solo I was like, yeah! “What are people’s problems? It’s a fine song.”

And I came straight here for a vigorous and spirited defense. Set the record straight. Folks, the verdict’s in. This is an okay tune.

DAMN OKAY.

In fact, (belated retroactive spoiler alert for the post title) it’s pretty great. And I don’t know if you’re savvy on the rankings, but that’s a damn sight better than pretty good.

It may even be great. Jury’s not quite in on that one.

No need to rush truth, people.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

The principal flaw of humanity.

I think a principal flaw of humanity is the refusal or failure to grant the other’s expertise. I mean here no stupid human trait mastered to trick level (magic trick, in radical effortless cases). Nor do I mean mere boom erudition magnetized by and alchemized in application and practice to depths incapable of sounding for the comparative layperson.

Both of those are excellent! They spice life up like whoa, and leave us often wondering for more. Both are entirely beside the point, here. Exclude them.

I mean the primal expertise we have. I believe we all have. It is expertise that comes will-ye or nil-ye in a sustained and continuous navigation of self into, within and all through reality. Only a fool would balk at acknowledging yes, this one has had dire plight experience and lived to tell right from wrong, stupid, impossible and unworkable plus plain misguided or mistaken aim - and in all candor, it wouldn’t even occur to most fools. To bother balking at so obvious a duh! Or to decisively withhold such acknowledgement, it wouldn’t occur to them. And in saying this, please know: I myself am a fool. Sorry. Too obvious?

It is never the other’s intelligence one insults with the obvious, but one’s own. Maybe. Most fools (being the only ones who could so balk or refuse) remain inconsiderate of it. Insensate - justly so! They have their own hands, fool! And overflowing in all moment, mostly. Or else all too empty, and such others-assessments ring truly hollow then. A vain procession of bells, tinkling as they take their toll unheeded in a mind occupied by emptiness. I’d disregard that, too.

So I do not assign fault let alone blame, here, but cut us a break. We do what we do because it saved us for this moment. We have much misaligned in us, much unexamined - and very much well-known in experience good, bad, ugly, and rare: brightly, brightly and with beauty! Those last flash to mind when we recall who we see ourselves being. In our best moments, and at our best. Who we are, which is also: what we are capable of.

Which is a mark well-missed and rued in mess-up and deferred untangling, basis-banging and hard work reasoning back up from where we fell - finding why, to aim from thereby. Hard work indeed, and few hark to a clarion note of joy in’t! And so unharked, the note unsounds. Joy never was unless felt and known. Joy never is, unless opened and surfed in a sense innocent and driven curiously to wonder. “Why not always such joy?” BECAUSE, STUPID.

Because: stupid. Yes.

Yes. I am too hard on us. Yet in fairness to myself, and with a mercy I’ve learned to my grief is all too well-deserved (wretch that I am, and do) I am also too hard on us. I mean for us. I have a hard on for us, for persons more than for humanity, that no amount of fad ice bucket challenge could droop, except for occasional tension relief as one’s organ of inexorable jut for humanity must needs exhale.

It exhales blood, but I mean the whole thing spiritually. Not in a gross, physical way. Far be that sh!t from me - and don’t get any on you, either. I assure you it is psychologically impossible to me to mean such things such ways. I find nothing gross in that sense in the physical! Rest assured this lil’ pure boy knows no shame in what’s only natural. Wow. Kill this tangent please, buddy.

Let’s bring it home, buddy. We must be buddies to each other, yet first perhaps: we must buddy ourselves, in a truer and more peaceful buddiness. A peace which finds its purpose within us: a place which exists to buddy from. A root which shoots to trunk and branch in spreading canopy, twigging like mad in budding that blooms not to fruits, so much, but in…bears.

Okay never mind I lost it.

IT’S THIS.

Others views, routines, coping-thriving-and-defense mechanisms and drives, values, tendencies, habits - all their inner array! Its greater splendor blissfully unknown to us (thank God). Which to our cocked eyes, all-askance in the pants and panting for understanding, may yet seem twisted - slipped, far too far-fetched to be fetching, ground to dust and metal shavings in an acrid burnt chemical smell of mismatch and disproportionate exertions, slipped and caught locked gears, perverted, stupid, dense or too-fancy-flighty, or in any other way disarrayed - are not so.

They are fit.

In the sense of “best fit.” With the understood tacky tack-on “…available.” With the further sad cynical note of “or any way, available to examination and trial, largely unexamined, largely untried. ‘Unavailable’ in that sense.” Yet don’t we know? Others are all too painfully aware of the misfit and misalignment that clangs within them, as it echoes out to ripple and widening flood in consequence of their choices and acts. In consequence, mostly, of unexpected outcomes. Unpredicted (well, unpredictable surely!) response.

We know. We know too well the dissonance within, and where and how it meets and fails often to mesh with the dissonance without. We know where and how we don’t fit better than how we do. Either way “why” remains elusive.

Herein though lies our expertise.

It should not be dismissed at all, let alone lightly. Yet we do. And so often, without passing thought so much as only passing through.

The symptom observed is this: the other, apparently, doesn’t know any better. The tart remark scribbled in our interview pad is: how the hell can they not? We know better than that. Please note the glint of humility peeping out! We really cannot credit or fathom that another’s ability is less than ours to grasp what we’ve found-and-valued obvious. We almost entirely neglect to note: obvious is a valuation that a) depends entirely from the found thing’s fit and pop once nested in one’s complex of inner frames, metrics and ironmost assumptions! Obvious pops a certain way within the known. But b) also depends on actually noticing the thing. Whereas invisibility to notice is practically the main superpower of the obvious! I digress. Again.

Shift the interview. Self-examination room. The symptom observed is this: of all the potential ‘better’ coursing and circulating abundantly to be known upon this specific problem we note we have, this too-frequent clash of gears-and-lenses within, HOW DO I KNOW which IS the better piece to install? And which will fit with what I’ve got? And not force too much inner wrenching discard and revision? OH DUH-FVCKADOODLE DODGE!

This specific misfit mangle-clash is not after all that bad. Perhaps it does not need fix? Perhaps it ain’t broke, so much as baroque. Just part of my unique and dare-I-say jaunty setup! Others have worse, and don’t even know or seem to deal with it. So complacency okay?

Yes, complacency okay overall - but on how many individual points, now? And the dissonance of misalignment between our points-complaced and theirs grows, nobody knows how much or how far. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Everybody knows how much and how far. “Why” remains elusive.

Yet upon the spike of the moment, we’ve declared a point insoluble and moved on. We must, to be okay with our imperfectible selves. Another gold star on the benevolence-charged kindergarten report card of our own known well expertise.

The flaw is this. Couldn’t we risk seeing others in the same way? THEIR report cards look like sh!t in our mind half the time! We grade not on the curve of a bell, but on some absolute per-point pivot system where faults must be ganged by redeeming qualities in quantity to offset - or the other falls in rankest rank! Yet really if we step back detach a bit, surely the work they do is not too dissimilar to our own. A difference in substance rather more than kind, and to scorn to see it is…rather less than kind.

By my lights anyhow. Important disclaimer: I only think this. It may be no more or less real than thoughts others have, for all I know. Sorry about the digression, up there by the way! It was no dick joke, merely a metaphor perhaps too equally fulsome and sincere. I need to learn the lesson myself:

Work not too-assiduously the first metaphor that comes to hand. Chances are, that bird should have remained unmolested in the bush, where its worth could be charitably graded “unknown.” Not bushwacked and carried high back to civilization in triumph! “Please! It’s a bird! It’s worth so much in my hand!”


With this post I award myself the coveted Master of Subjectivity degree. Note 1: self-coveted. Note 2: “award” is slightly off. More “I both accord and afford myself” - unanimous decision with one abstemious, begrudged assent to no opposed. 2: it is one degree only. There are at least three-fifty-nine others, and may be as many as 7.8 billion odd. Go get your own. Mine is taken, and indeed too far.

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Thought of the day: on feek

"Defecate" is to rid oneself of feces. "Fecate" then is to attain feces. Fecation is eating.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Strange Tales of Repartee #3

Somebody called me ridonkulous, I called her redickudonk. Then she called me redonkudick.

I think she won that one.

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Fiction Friday Pt. Now: Jayce the Furdragon

“Jayce the furdragon had been rejected by the Academy of the Krav-Magus for the third time. The application consisted of writing yourself into the future alumni list. It was a significant test of one’s storywarping abilities. Once you’d proved you’d graduate, you could go. Jayce knew he could not submit another application without risking the Loser’s Curse, which would follow him for life. He’d seen it trailing shamefully in the dirt-wake his older brother Volm’s tail made: a faint, hovering glow; a silhouette in outline of some unmistakably pathetic eldritch avatar of failure.”

Jayce stopped. She read it again. Am I starting too far into things? Should I go back and lay more ground? Am I sure about being a he, here?

Again. What would the silhouette of the Loser’s Curse be a silhouette of? She hit Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X, pretending to delete the whole thing while giving herself an out, in case.

“I’ll never be a novelist,” she huffed. Nobody wants to read about stupid furdragons, living in their own complex, highly-evolved society next to the humans who can totally see them but find them entirely unremarkable and ridiculous, apart from the occasional moral panic. Her eyes lit up. Pasting the clipboard’s content back where it was (just in case), she opened a new tab and began typing swiftly:
“Jayce half shrieked, half roared. He was stretched to his limbs’ limits on a space-age polymer-alloy apparatus. The Christians had finally snapped, and were putting furdragons everywhere on trial by punishment. Jayce has already seen his brother Volm broken and discarded, carted away. Now it was his turn. Could he endure the unendurable? Who would care? How could a ‘loving God’ let such things happen in this world?”

Jayce grinned, on a roll at last. How could a loving God? She loved God, and was sure God would get her through this latest thing with Stissy and Kyla and the test, but she was at least eighty percent certain that in a world with real furdragons, just trying to live their lives unpunished, Christians wouldn’t put up with it. Especially if they could learn magic and cast spells! Jayce frowned.

She looked at what she’d just typed.

“Crap, I killed Jayce.” She hadn’t really been paying attention. It had been brutally, perversely (pervertedly?) beautiful, and was surely the best thing she’d ever written. “This will never get published,” she hissed!

The thought came again. “I killed Jayce.” How could she bring him back, undo the best thing she’d ever written?

She’d killed Jayce.

There was no way to notice what was happening. Her skin had grown all softer soft; she ran a hand down her arm and touched plush. Something felt out through the back of the chair, something she could feel to its forked tip, stiff with sensitive bristles. Her face grew more beautiful, she was so sure, eyes uncanny in size, slightly alien in shape. Her irises gone a dully-gleaming gold. He was dusk lavender all over. She hadn’t pictured what that meant. He was stretched to his limbs’ limits on some unforgiving thing, the central attraction in a huge, spherical soundstage too bright and hateful to look at.

“Open your eyes.” said a harsh voice.

He opened his eyes.

He thought it would be her dad or something! He thought it would be a dream. She definitely hadn’t gone to sleep!

It was no dream. Stissy the Undercutioner of the Christians stood over him and smiled, blandly handsome and utterly inoffensive as she’d pictured and planned to describe him. The effect of all he knew was terrifying. “You stand accused, dear ‘Jayce,’ of trafficking and meddling with foul powers. You are charged with storywarping, which as you very well know is a capital crime.”

Jayce winced in lengthening pain, suddenly aware, as if sensation had come back from wandering to find its sweet house being torn apart and down. No way. No way. I will not give in to this.

“Do you have any last words? A confession, perhaps?” The Undercutioner’s tone was plummy, as if enjoying a good gossip with an inferior pal.

“I will not give in to you!” Jayce half-roared, half-shrieked. “Whatever you want, you’ll get none of it from me! What kind of ‘loving God’-”

The long iron bar pulled back with a hiss and a hard, final clank. The result was not beautiful, but fascinating, Stissy thought. As many times as he’d seen it, he couldn’t quite put his finger on the appeal. So many tuning in, as well. Well, he might as well say something for the viewing audience.

“That’s enough of that, I think.” Stissy the Undercutioner whirled on one boot, clicked his heels, and bowed.