House of Eratosthenes

I’m afraid it is exactly what it looks like, which is a pissing contest between two alpha-dog-males. Is it sexist of me to presume the vandal is a male? If so, it’s not the only poorly-advised thing I’m doing here…how does that old saying go, “never get into an argument with a fool, he’ll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience” or something. Well, we know how this is going to go. It’ll rock back and forth, weekend to weekend, until one of us relocates or else concludes that it just isn’t worth the hassle anymore. Repair, destruction, repair, destruction. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s a dialogue. Me: “Stop wrecking my fence, for I will never stop rebuilding it.” He: “Stop rebuilding, you have located it in a terrain outside of your control, and I’ll remind you of this without end.”

It’s a contest between order and chaos, and this was the inspiration behind that observation I made so many years ago, about Architects and Medicators, formerly Yin and Yang — two halves of humanity that actually should not be coming into contact with each other. Most of our problems in society, I maintain, result from such contact being made. This is just the kind of thing that reinforces that view.

It’s the kind of thing that inspired my very first thoughts about it:

The guy who’s never held a job, gets drunk all day, doesn’t pay child support, thinks he’s doing everything just right. He’s got problems, of course; but he figures his problems are caused by the cop that busted him for loitering, the district attorney who learned about the child support delinquency and decided to go after him, and the judge who sentenced him. You know, in his own world, he’s right. Where he comes from, people don’t take responsibility. They push it off somewhere else. So the problem comes not from his refusal to accept responsibility — they come from the expectation of others that he should do so. He has is own expectations: His ex-wife should marry some hard-working lunchbox carrying guy, who will cheerfully take on the responsibility of raising another man’s kids. This would free him up to be left alone to smoke grass and drink hooch all day, since, after all, that’s what he’s used to. That’s the way it’s supposed to work: Responsibility for those who accept it, and not for those who don’t. Purely optional.

Who cares where we would all be, if we all coped with life the way he does? How does that matter? Who ever said we should all do everything the same way, anyway?

Maybe that’s the answer.

Of course, how it matters is easily answered: When he doesn’t pay child support, his kids get hurt. That makes sense. But it makes sense in our world, which is the point. In the miscreant’s world it doesn’t make as much sense. Because nothing does; nothing matters except feeling good, and all of the time. The conflict is between immediate gratification, and delayed.

Because of that, there arises another conflict between the limited universe, and the unlimited. Example: A few months ago I, the creator/preserver/repairer/homeowner, chanced across a brand of mulch and grass seed that actually caused me some excitement. Over the past few days or weeks I have made the discovery that the stuff has an unfortunate tendency to spawn grubs, and the grubs attract what we think are skunks. Earlier this summer I thought I was living in a universe that didn’t have skunks in it. Since my desire is to create, preserve and repair, the way I look at it now is that I was living in a universe that has skunks in it, I just didn’t know it at the time. So there is reality, and then there is my perception of it — two different things.

This helps to explain the Medicator mindset, with regard to fences destroyed that someone has to rebuild, and child support not paid that someone else has to produce. Would the Medicator acknowledge that someone has been harmed? And the answer is no. The limited universe. There is a periphery around it, and all the people hurt by his lust for immediate gratification, and his sloth, and the thrill he feels from lobbing bricks through windows, are outside the periphery. They’re in “Here Be Dragons” territory. You aren’t supposed to be talking about this stuff. Might make him feel bad. And the whole point to life is to not feel bad.

“Point to life”; see, there is another clear, crisp, primal definition of the difference. There is a conflict between those who worry about the impact they’re having about the world as they pass through it, and those who worry about the impact the world has upon them. It seems at times like neither side can ever hope to even begin to understand the other. Over on this side of the wall, for example, doesn’t it just necessarily follow that “the point to life” has got to be entirely invested on what we’re doing to the things around us, rather than the other way around? And it is often outside our way of understanding things, when we are confronted by the true answer: No, not for everybody it doesn’t. There are people who think we’re all here to be entertained. And not just a few people either.

They are not harmless. They wreck things, and they wreck them because of the Morgan Freeberg Charismatic Wrecking Ball Theory. It is, near as I can figure, a process of elimination. Nobody really wants to just sit and do nothing, for any length of time, anymore than anybody can really “lie in bed all day” on a weekend. Sooner or later you have to get something to eat, shit shower & shave, make things happen. If you want to make things happen, you can build, preserve or destroy, just those three things, nothing else. Building demands coping with the delayed gratification; preservation, as I shall demonstrate in a few hours as I attend to my fence repair chores, ditto. That leaves one thing left — and that’s why I have a fence I have to fix.

And every fucking weekend for the foreseeable future, it would seem. What a foolish errand of mine this is! And yet…it is a perfect microcosm of our society as a whole. Is it not? The fence is torn asunder, repeatedly, ritually, like the gizzard of Prometheus torn from his gut ever day, because it sits on the boundary of these two worlds. All of the trouble takes place on that boundary, while the champions of each side labor tirelessly to reach across, and teach that other side how it’s gonna be. It’s an endless drain on the resources, but both sides keep doing it because neither side has a choice. And of course, only one side is worried about resources.

Thought I’d go ahead and blog about it. Why not? I can put in zero hours, let the vandal win; put in one hour, “win the argument” for this weekend, and move on to the next thing; I can put in two hours, implement the repairs and then blog about the situation. I’m opting to go full tilt, “in for a penny, in for a pound.” Because that conflict we have on the create/preserve/repair side of society’s “fence,” is also worth some pondering. Probably more worthwhile than anything else involved, for you see, if this is really a battle of wills between the two sides, it doesn’t do any good over the long run to try to win at that battle, and then keep quiet about it. Sooner or later, the Medicators/Destroyers have the potential to find a voice, make their own P.R. department if you will, and prevail in the court of public opinion. And so those of us on this side, have to find that second hour, come up with the resources to spend on that, too. While we’re actually working for a living, building things that actually work, or at least trying to, or learning what we need to do differently to make them work.

In this way, we’re being double-taxed. Makes one wonder what the net cost is, dealing with the conflict every day and every year. We don’t often bother to tally it, because we haven’t got any choice. But, I’m sure some reading this post will think, among many other things, “Morgan you really should take stock of how much time, materials and supplies you’re putting into this.” Which is absolutely correct. The same is true of all of us; just because we have no choice but to continue in the conflict, burning away time that might be spent on other things if the conflict was not there, and we can’t see a way right now to make the conflict go away — doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be adding, calculating, computing, assessing. We’ve shown ourselves, as a society, to be quite gifted at this “tolerance” thing, we’ve been tolerating an awful lot. Figuring up the cost of the tolerance, that’s one place where we could stand to show some improvement. There’s little point to it the way things are now, but perhaps the better-comprehended numbers would motivate us to explore some options, and some of those explored options might provide the point.

Speaking of which, this is my favorite theory for the time being to explain it all: The point. An appreciation for delayed gratification, is something you learn early on, when there is a point. We’re dealing with the glassy-eyed nihilists, I think, who failed to see the point to developing such a thing, as they teetered on the brink of majority age. And so their situation is a confusing and sad one: They delight in the thrill of breaking windows, wrecking fences, et al, but they’re also trapped in a world in which that’s about all there is to do. Now there’s no way they can grow any further, except by way of losing arguments to fence-repairer Architect types like me — which is not something that’s going to happen, certainly not with any frequency. The current battle does not favor my side. Spock said it best: “As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.”

I say, trained chipmunks, with frikin’ LASERS on their heads.
- CaptDMO | 09/06/2015 @ 13:02
And sue for repair costs of at least one million…no…one BEELLION dollars!
- P_Ang | 09/07/2015 @ 08:15
[…] We’re All Treated Equally, Graft is Harder Their Destructive Power A Joke on the Internet The Reversal of Trump Coming of Age Illinois Can’t Pay Big Lottery […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/12/2015 @ 03:48
[…] about how the masses who are asses fuck with us, when you get right down to it, destroying things because they’re bored and haven’t got anything better to do. Those are commoners; these are elites. Both enticed, and often, and relatively recently, to […]
- If We’re All Treated Equally, Graft is Harder | H2o Positivo | 09/14/2015 @ 10:18
Put up a simple security camera, or a “deer cam”.
Record the other party’s activities and then engage the local constabulary.
Personally, once evidence was obtained in this fashion, I could think of a dozen different ways to have some “fun” with the perpetrator rather than going to the police.
Fun for me, unpleasant for the soon to be Beta male.
- bammit | 09/22/2015 @ 07:45

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Their Destructive PowerSaturday, September 5th, 2015

Their Destructive Power
Saturday, September 5th, 2015