MetaMonk

Smart

Intelligence is the most acceptable metric in judging a person. Sure, how poor, fat, or ugly someone is is taken into account, but it makes you look like a shallow asshole when you cite these criteria for belittling a person’s value. But “He’s dumb. He just doesn’t get it,” is still considered valid grounds for dismissal. It’s still safe to prop up your superiority on the intellect scale, whereas there’s been an incremental and insistent march toward equality on all other fronts.

As if the only possible reason that someone could disagree with my position is that she is too stupid to understand my reasoning. A safe smugness envelopes any two people busy jerking each other off about how much smarter they are than everybody else who disagrees. After all, the world is filled with only two types of folks: those who agree with me, and dipshits who don’t.

A tangent: It is indeed a baffling experience to fence an opponent on any topic and realize that he knows your every feint and attack and has a perfectly reasonable parry for each. Sometimes it’s even relieving to be defeated, as then I can note my inaccuracies and tweak my position. However, when a clash of ideas ends in a stalemate, a slight despair ensues. Here is one can match wits, in a civil enough manner that neither of us get distracted by our roles as adversaries, and we still ultimately reach an impasse. What hope is there that there can ever be a common understanding between ideological foes, especially those who don’t have a social obligation to maintain the relationship? Of course, it’d be ideal if conflicting viewpoints could cohabit the world, but some are simply incompatible.

So the “smart enough to get it” binary that we fabricate is, as most binaries are, an easy and entirely inaccurate way of organizing the world. Plenty of folks who are much smarter than I have contradictory opinions, and worse yet, there are plenty of dumbfucks who agree with me. We are too trigger-happy with our dismissals of disagreeing ideas, as it preserves our precious sense that we are right. If we can write off someone for not getting it, then we are justified in throwing up our hands and then washing them clean, rather than pulling one another’s teeth toward a mutual understanding. It’s really an excuse to shirk your duty of sharing existence with everybody else.

A good first step is tolerating different opinions, or at least restraining the urge to stomp them out. But choosing to ignore and dismiss them is like deciding to climb a mountain and then planting your flag the first time you break for camp, satisfied and laughing at the people still living in the valley.

You can be smart and wrong. You can be stupid and right. They don’t have as direct a link as we pretend. And neither being smart nor right has nearly the significance that we weigh them down with.

Finally, a comic I strive to keep in mind daily.

http://xkcd.com/774/

Blue Pill

A deep guilt surrounds my attraction to the blue pill option in the Matrix. And that guilt is protected by a near-reflexive defensiveness, one that works unceasingly to quell the lurking suspicion that cowardice is one of my core character flaws.

Not that I would trade in my comrades for the blue pill, like Cypher did. But like him, I might refuse the reality of the red pill, for myself, if properly informed of its consequences at the very beginning. Certainly the possible pleasures of the Matrix versus the grim reality of the real world are motivating factors, but the choice isn’t just about a false heaven and a true hell. Reality is not inherently persuasive.

There is a particular junction in my mind where several different trains of thought meet, and somewhere in the confusion, the presupposition that there need be an objective reality was lost. Foremost is my belief that Truth, regardless of its existence or nonexistence, is absolutely inaccessible by anyone. We are all so limited in our perceptive capacities, that claims of even an inkling are only hubris. The realities we seemingly share with other individuals are only mass hallucinations, propped up by the powers of consensus. And if you grant that internal certainties are valid, then you are left with solipsism, it not outright schizophrenia.

If the preceding paragraph isn’t confusing, then perhaps you can explain to me where I fucked up. Logically, it seems that wemustpresuppose an objective reality, even if it completely distorted by our inadequate perceptions. But what difference does it make then if we are separate by an insurmountable gulf?

Instead of saying I’m skeptical of reality’sexistence, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m skeptical of its automatic meaningfulness. Yusuf’s dream-sharing den in Inception screams my name even more loudly than The Matrix’s blue pill. I couldn’t find the appropriate clip, maybe no one else was fascinated by its allure as I was. You get to play Creator-gods with a bunch of your friends. What does reality have to offer that can trump that existence?

I love to lucid dream. The only advantage waking life has over it is the company. Insert company into lucid dreams and reality has very little to offer. Maybe I’m not just a coward, but also a petty child, content to dwell in fantasies. My headspace is plenty for me. Probably why everyone thinks I’m an only child, the solipsistic bent to my narcissism.

Anal

I’ve thrown away more than a year into the timesuck of Reddit. Entire days reading articles and trawling the comments for gems, like pearls in pig shit. It got to the point that the bulk of my reading, which has always been prodigious, was composed of comments on a public internet forum. While joining in discussions and the occasional flamewar, I noticed my writing skills deteriorating, beyond what could be attributed to having finished school and no longer writing formal papers. Embarrassing errors like stumbling with grammar and stepping on the toes of homophones, like I forgot all the individual steps when before the words danced effortlessly according to the rhythm of my thoughts.

Part of it can be chalked up to plain ol’ impatience, the urgency to get in my two cents as soon as possible to maximize the return on my investment, namely attention. I even fell prey occasionally to the cardinal sin of failing to RTFA. If you get into cyber fisticuffs, the pace only speeds up, the medium allowing an ordered to-and-fro instead of the frantic yelling over each other that would usually occur in a real-time argument.

There was also the eventual quelling of my grammar Nazi, growing bored with nitpicking others’ comments, especially because that spawned uninteresting responses as prescriptivists rehashed the same damn arguments with the fuckless, completely derailing the actual topic of discussion. But you take the grammar Nazi out of uniform, you end up with a regular guy, unable to spot all the hidden Jews among the comments. He gets old, he gets slow, he gets inattentive and before he knows it, there are some in his own backyard. How embarrassing.

An incremental relaxation of standards, in both others and myself, and how quickly I succumbed to the pull of the mean. It’s worth noting, however, that I did not at all suffer these consequences when years ago my online home was Xanga. I cultivated a subscription list mostly of people who’d be both arrogant and masochistic enough to consider themselves a writer. In lieu of an editor, that at least served as a buffer against the lax standards of the internet. Plus there was rarely a bumrush to submit anything, with sufficient time to couch my thoughts in carefully teased out sentences.

As the written word becomes subsumed more and more by the “self-publishing” umbrella, whether that be an ebook, comment, blog post, or tweet, the writing of the collective group that exists on the internet will slide toward average literacy. Without the editors who clean up books and articles, people will read increasing amounts of poorly written material, unconsciously pulled toward its level, barring a conscientious effort to combat it. I don’t mean to be an alarmist. I concede that linguists have it right that language is constantly changing and prescriptivism is an uninteresting approach reserved for anal hacks. After all, most people seem to have grown out of the way they typed in high school, understanding the need for both clear communication as well as the importance of signaling intelligence. The opposite force, of course, is the creeping in of internet acronyms into actual speech. But I’m going to stop here before I start another round of heaving.