A Year Later
February 8th, 2024
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." --George Box
I pulled up this old archive of posts being inspired by the write a letter to yourself in the future idea. I read the posts I had made here, and was surprised at the overall dark, brooding, and melancholic tone pushed out here. It might even be a little too angsty for me now.
But of the horrible complaining and whining--which is, quite frankly, alright for a miserable young adult--I was surprised by the quality of writing on some entries. Particularly this one on a practical approach to faith and free will.
After reading, I felt compelled to add on another entry on how I think and to publish this blog to Neocities once again. Publishing it online, after all, is the safest way of ensuring it survives many years. I'll keep a copy of these messages on many servers so that they may survive a decade. Hopefully.
Perception
Sure, I saw the world as a horrible place. I saw myself as a horrible person. But, for the past few months I've been thinking.
What did I mean by "horrible"? The word "horrible" is an ethical judgement after all. So if my perception is an ethical issue, what sense of morality do I have to claim "horribleness"?
I think back to my past: I was raised Catholic. For those not familiar, all Catholics learn that all men are born sinners, and we always will be. That's why we go to Church and confess our sins to repent.
Well, it's no wonder I'm miserable. By assumption, I was born wrong. But that begs the question, why don't all Catholics brand themselves with the same species of self-hatred as I have?
I think back again. There is another reason: I am inherently evil and violent. In my childhood, I would kick, push, shove my siblings and caretakers. I would lie, cheat, and steal from my classmates. I would be mockingly condescending towards my peers who couldn't "get it" as fast as I could during my school days, and would throw tantrums and fits whenever things didn't go my way.
In other words, I was a sociopathic child. I didn't want to be. But, I didn't have a intuitive sense of societal morality. I was not popular in elementary school.
I do have an intuitive sense of morality, but it's misaligned with my surroundings. My Catholic education reaffirmed the conclusions I had as a child that I was evil, and I needed restraint.
Be Yourself
It's always plagued me: how can you "be yourself" if your beliefs clash with your surroundings? "Being yourself" would mean to do things that you believe are right, even when everyone else thinks you're wrong.
That's a common thread in a lot of stories, but the hero usually is already conventionally right, and it's painfully obvious to the audience that everyone else in the story is conventionally wrong. Rarely, if ever, do I see a story with a warped hero who doesn't ahere to a socially acceptable ethical system. If there is, it's likely not a popular story, and it's only read by people like me.
Here's a thought experiment: what if "being yourself" involved hurting and harming other people? What if your morals require you, with justification, to hurt other people? In stories this is fine, but what about real life?
Many people will say that you shouldn't be yourself.
But that's where it gets tricky: if you aren't going to be yourself, you are lying to your mind and soul. Dishonesty is an obvious sin.
It's a Catch-22 if you're born with the wrong moral intuition. If you act honestly you break the agreed ethical system, and if you act dishonestly according to the rules, you are a wrongful liar.
Freedom as an Animal
With this contradiction in mind, it's come to my attention that good and evil as an obejctive universal cannot exist if its subjective. Justice is a moving target.
Stop for a second. Are you conscious at this very point of reading? Or are you the subconscious? Why engage with these models of reality, when we will never reach a truth? "All models are wrong, but some are useful."
So before you go down the path of ethics and right and wrong, remember there's something more primitive, before all the abstractions, that just ask of us to be.
Perhaps consciousness was the ultimate trap, and that cognition is an illusion. That we get trapped in our endless arguments in the conscious realm we forget that we are subconscious animals first. To be, not the meta-thinking, restrictive abstraction monster I've become.
