House of Eratosthenes

For a number of years now I’ve had to inspect how people think, if for no other reason than to try to reduce my conflicts with them. Seems I have more conflict than the average bear, although there’s really no way to prove that. Personal conflicts are like credit card debt; nobody talks up what they have, they prefer to play it down. But when it comes to conflict — and this flies in the face of what a lot of people think about me, I’m sure — I’m always on the lookout for ways to reduce it. Aren’t we all?

Obviously, the best way to avoid is through prevention. If we aim to prevent, we have to look at root causes. Through a very slow process of inspecting it and analyzing it and thinking it out, in my own episodes I have identified three:

1. Conflict I create when I notice something;
2. Conflict I create when I infer about what is going on, from what I have noticed;
3. Conflict I create when I decide what should be done, about what I think is going on.

What I have aimed to do by filing & sorting these conflict-ignition episodes, is to form a better understanding about what can be done to prevent. About as far as I’ve managed to take it, up to now, is this: If we’re creating conflict through events #2 or #3, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let’s talk it out. With regard to #1, I honestly don’t know what to do. If I’m getting in trouble just for noticing something, “don’t notice it” certainly doesn’t strike me as constructive solution. “Notice it, but keep your mouth shut” isn’t much better; depending on what’s being noticed, it might actually be worse.

So I don’t know what to do with #1. I may never figure it out. Not sure I want to. It might strike some as a bit harsh to say something like “If you can’t be my friend when I notice the wrong things, you’re probably a lousy friend and I don’t want you anyway” — but yeah, that does come pretty close to where I’ve settled on it. Who wants a bunch of friends who stop being friends when you notice the wrong stuff? It isn’t the kind of life I want to live, knowwhatimean?

How this matters lately: The statistical breakdown is not remaining static with the passage of time. I’m seeing, lately, a LOT of conflict is arising from #1: I’m noticing something, and someone else doesn’t want me to.

Maybe that means I’m just getting really, really good at avoiding conflict with the #2 and #3. It could mean that, but I don’t think so. I’m not that sharp, for one thing, and for another thing it isn’t just my personal conflicts to which I’m referring here. Other people are noticing the “wrong things,” and other other people don’t want them noticing those things.

Because a healthy thinker will infer what’s going on from what is noticed, what follows is a bit hard to assess so I’ve been nooding this one over awhile: It seems a great many of these #2 and #3 conflicts, which are disagreements about what’s going on & what to do about it, are actually #1 conflicts. Maybe all of them are. Example: If I infer there is a plot among radical-Islamists to attack the United States, from my understanding that the Boston bombers turned out to be radicalized Chechen Muslims, and someone disagrees with me about this — I can take it to the bank now, that not only do they disagree with me about the plot but they are likely to still be living in the fantasy-narrative-bubble that the Boston bomber was a right-wing Tea Party type. In other words, in the times in which we live now, it has become stylish and popular to concede nothing. This isn’t just a gripe-against-lefties again; I wish it were.

My gripe, to be usefully specific about it, is against people who don’t discuss, and can’t discuss, because they don’t think. About much, anyway. They might do some minimal thinking about how this-opinion or that-opinion will make them more popular within the social circles they have targeted, but not about too much else. And, for some extra clarity, when I say “don’t discuss” I don’t mean they’re sitting down, folding their arms, zipping their lips shut and staring straight ahead…nothing like that. Oh, heavens no. They talk. They can yell, they can type, they can interrupt, they can bitch and kvetch and whine and browbeat and coerce and bludgeon and cudgel and slam.

They can type-and-gripe. They just don’t discuss anything. If you listen to & watch what they say, after filtering out the bunny trails and the “gotcha” maneuvers, you find they’re just repeating the same “facts” over and over. You haven’t too long to wait before someone makes some kind of inquiry, politely or otherwise, about how it is they know the things they think they know. But you better not wait for them to provide a decent answer because you aren’t going to get it.

Perhaps they’re just “medicating.” By and large, they do seem to have addictive personalities, and that is consistent with Medicators; I’ve said for years that Architects think, Medicators feel, and the conflict between these two seems to be unavoidable. So inevitable is this divide, and so deep, and so debilitating, that I seriously wonder if they should be existing alongside each other at all. Repeating the same thing over and over again in a vain attempt to convince someone who hasn’t been convinced already, is a classic symptom of arguing-by-feel as opposed to by-think. It is to be expected, right? When you got to your conclusion by feeling, and you’ve recited those feelings to someone else to invite him onto your little bandwagon but it hasn’t worked yet — what else can you do other than try again, and in so doing, get more and more frustrated.

This is exactly what I see them doing.

The hardcore cases are confined, in their vocabulary of forensic maneuvering, to presenting nothing possessing any persuasive weight save for their own intransigence. Their operating credo seems to be one of, “You might as well come around to my way of thinking, for I shall never, ever, ever come around to yours.” If you were to take a large sheet of butcher paper and plot out a flow chart showing what it is they think they know, in little bubbles connected by lines to how they think they know it — there’d be nothing to plot. One bubble, no lines, and you’d be done. In these discussions that catch their fancy, they impose themselves into the role of a brick wall. Immovable and impassable. It decides nothing, does nothing to make anything go, but certainly does something to make things stop.

Grumpy Obama These human brick walls get testy in short order because, I think, what they want is an impossibility: Limitless influence on the outcome, while laboring under the burden of exactly zero decisions. There is some universal appeal to that. A lot of people want exactly that. The most useless bureaucrats, from the Ozymandias who dresses nicely and outranks everybody although he’s done precisely nothing in life to distinguish himself, all the way down to the agency clerk who makes you wait endlessly for his break to be over just so you can fill out a form all over again — they irritate us. They’d irritate us if we saw them only once in a lifetime. Lately they seem to be everywhere, as if our society, or something in it, thinks the human-brick-walls are the endgame-objective of the efforts of everyone else, and life will become sweet and beautiful if & when we can turn out more of these types. We’re not irritated quite so much because they use up our time and our resources, or that they make even humble chores much more difficult, or because they remind us that some organization or peerage is not the meritocracy it’s supposed to be; they irritate us because they cause us a lot of trouble while they chase this impossibility. Winning the argument, all of the time, conceding nothing, ever, and all without deciding anything or doing any real, grounded thinking at anytime. They want to have the last word. They lack the mental discipline to even have the first one.

When these human-brick-walls get frustrated with the results, it’s everybody else’s fault. Although, what they’re trying to do, is kind of like merging onto a busy highway, poking along at 15 miles an hour, and being determined to stay out in front of everyone. It usually doesn’t work because in real life, if you really want to be the top dog and win all the arguments, you have to make some decisions. If you try to make it the whole way without actually making any decisions about what-a-fact-means, or what-to-do-about-it, then one way or another, sooner or later, life is going to hand you an education and you aren’t going to like it.

Don’t get all honked off at me about it, I didn’t make it that way. I’m not that important. That’s just how it works.

It all makes sense when you crowdsource your thinking, I guess.

These days, my default assumption is that literally every single liberal position has one — and only one — connection to every other liberal position: Social validation.

A small semi-digression: Reading your thoughts on #1-type conflicts, all I could think about was junior high school, when I moved across the country. Unbeknownst to me, tight-rolled jeans were in fashion at my new school, but hadn’t penetrated to my old hometown yet. Being young and naive, I asked a classmate “why is everybody doing that stupid thing with the cuffs of their pants?” That was it. Even though I showed up the next day with the most impeccable tight-rolls you’ve ever seen, I was a pariah from then on out. I was permanently uncool.

Liberalism is like that. Liberalism is cool. “Marriage equality” or what have you is cool the way tight-rolled jeans were cool — someone somewhere decided that was the look to have this semester, but by the time summer break was over, anyone who showed up in tight-rolls was a hopeless dork. The only way to be cool and stay cool in high school is to subject your every attitude and action to constant scrutiny… and to viciously denigrate anyone who doesn’t measure up or is a second behind the times, even if what they’re doing and wearing now was the height of cool two months ago.

And, of course, pointing out that rolling one’s jean cuffs into tourniquets is pretty fucking retarded makes you an insta-pariah. Or a conservative. Which is pretty much the same thing.
- Severian | 04/23/2013 @ 18:14
It’s almost like you’re saying, liberals are people who simply never matured too much past age fifteen………

Hmm.

But I guess with these disagreements that result from #1, maybe the way to avoid conflict is to just say, “Okay. I noticed something and you’re pissed at me for noticing it.” Like, with the Boston bombers being Chechen Muslims: This summation might seem abrupt and tactless, but it’s less likely to result in lasting conflict & hard feelings than debating ENDLESSLY about whether Muslims are more violent than Christians, et cetera, which seems to be the way people are going about it. Maybe it’s just more reasonable to say “Alright, I want to absorb reality before I make decisions, whereas you’re impervious to reality, let’s ‘agree to disagree’ as they say…but let’s make a note of why we disagree before we do that. You know what the facts are, and you don’t like them.”

Because, let’s be real: Show me a thousand people who thought, as of eight days ago, that the bombing was carried out by right-wing tax-protesting Tea Bagger middle-age-receding-hairline white males…and…I’ll show you a thousand people who think that in the moment I’m writing this. Evidence immune.
- mkfreeberg | 04/23/2013 @ 19:40
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. 🙂 Wish I could remember who said it (Capt DMO? Nightfly? A regular or semi-regular here, anyway), but truer words were never spoken: “Liberalism is the lifelong attempt to make high school come out right.”

I suppose the shrinks would say that’s exactly the tactic, to say “I notice this, and I notice you’re angry that I noticed it,” and then move on. If the end goal is your own mental health, that is, and really what else could it be? We all know you can’t reason someone out of a position they were never reasoned into.

Problem is, we’re just not wired that way. It’s why good children’s — as opposed to “young adult” — literature is hard to find; it’s really tough for an adult to turn the mental clock back that far. Society doesn’t operate unless we assume adults are rational actors most of the time; they’re actively trying to direct the posture of the world’s strongest military and economic power based on a manifest irrationality. George Orwell noticed it in the 1930s — the British ruling class couldn’t take the German military threat seriously because they couldn’t take Nazism seriously. Rational people just can’t function, faced with a lunatic in power.

[The other problem, of course, is they’re so damn smug about everything. Me, I’m Forrest Gump — I think stupid is as stupid does, and smart is as smart does. I just can’t handle being called dumb and dogmatic by somebody who thinks Oprah’s Book Club is great literature and Jon Stewart is some kind of fucking sage].
- Severian | 04/24/2013 @ 05:44
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- House of Eratosthenes | 04/24/2013 @ 12:13
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- House of Eratosthenes | 04/27/2013 @ 08:54
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- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2013 @ 13:26

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