Wittgenstein's Whispers
July 19th, 2024
If all words are contextual, their meaning in the collective conscious, and all forms of logical argument wholly dependent on a few shakey axioms, assumptions that can be disproven at any successive time epoch, then could all arguments eventually fall apart?
And really, are these assumptions just the collective delusions of the human race so far? For example, the word "freedom" seems, quite free, and free to be freely redefined at any given notice. I feel like the freedom that corpses were made for in the seventeen hundreds is not the same freedom the War in Iraq the Americans of today fought for. But the abstraction has been tainted, moulded, and shifted into exactly what is required of the situation.
That's why I tend to like to stick to my senses and avoid the abstraction: I think it's too shakey. It's not fundamental, and it's easily manipulatable. From a meta-sense, I think it'd only make sense to argue about what our senses truly can all perceive, and not propositions built off of shakey abstractions.
To same someone is "courageous," well, I'd rather much say that he's done a lot of good deeds, ones that are risky and nobody wants to do, but he does it anyway for the benefit of us all. So I'll say he's courageous. I feel like relying on abstraction can lead to differing interpretation, which is where a lot of misrepresentation and miscommunication comes from.
And, the way I structure my thought, I think I'll try to stay as baseline as possible and avoid abstraction. Though, I will admit, my job does require of me to, well, work out the abstractions.
Depression Spiral, Bipolar? Or Something else
I've hit another rut, and my heart frankly feels heavy. I feel like my heartbeat is slow and my chest is tight in some slight pain. I feel fatigued, tired, and sad.
Thoughts come to my head that criticize me, and I can't bear to accept my own soul. I want to lay on a set of train tracks and look at the sky. Or, quite, maybe not, depending on who's reading this.
I think that assassin in the news might have felt something akin to Camus' character in The Stranger, where the man decided to shoot someone because the sun was too hot. The absurdism of the world just came crashing down.
I read in the news that they found all of the assassin's internet history. What a wonder if someone I knew correctly identified myself as the writer of this website. I'd be mortified, but hopefully, I'd be dead at that point.
It's not that I find the content embarrassing, I just find the content embarrassingly boring. Like, as if anyone would want to read the bland musings of some random guy on the internet. I just pray and hope I fade into some sort of obscurity.
At the very least, I'll have a memoir to write based off of these articles if I ever get old. I'll be able to write and recount exactly what I thought at the time, jogging my memories with each of these entries. Hundreds of them. I'll be able to summarize and create a neat little story for my descendants to consume.
If I'll ever have descendants.
The Future, and the Future
In a couple days I make my move to another state. I'll be moving away from my parents so far, far away. My mother is sad. My father seems sad about the change too. My parents come from my grandparents, who lived in a single, closely-knit village their entire lives before the war. We are a tightly-knit farmer-esque breed of family, so breaking apart like this is rather painful.
Urban families, I notice, tend to be more mobile and more acceptant of mobility. Families of nomadic descendant as well. However, farmer families tend to not take the changes very well.
I urged my parents to join a church, or some form of organized religion. I understand there is a lot of pushback in modern day against faith, but I'll reassert to everyone I strongly believe there is a reason organized religion exists in every culture in the world. Anthropology does not lie: we need religions to bound ourselves to each other and spiritually to the world.
Or, at least, those are the words I tell myself. Regardless, the fact is at its base true: every culture has a religion, and secular society is destroying that idea and facing consequences.
On the topic of Wittgenstein, I see religion the same way as science or any of that nonsense. They are BOTH a set of logically formed propositions resting on weak axioms of assumption. To me, they are the same. Any belief in science is just as absurd as any belief in religion.
When I have time to myself, I'll be joining a temple or a church of sorts. I'll see to myself a spiritual change and offer myself wholeheartedly to it. I pray that I can change who I am, or at the very least find some socially acceptable way to lash out at myself.
My roommate who is responsible for finding a place to stay has been very... late. Irresponsible to say, because he has not done exactly that, rather being wishy-washy about the whole ordeal. It's giving me a bit of headache, and I sincerely am considering breaking things off and finding a place on my own to stay since I have the funds for it. I don't see why not.
Revisiting my Childhood, how bad was it?
It's hard to know the facts after being so long distanced from it. I'll try to recount it as best as I could without being, weird about it.
When I was in second grade, sitting in the gifted and talented class, I thought aloud, "Why are we here?" Remarkably, everyone laughed, and I laughed with them. But I reiterated that's not what I meant. I meant, as in, an existential way. What are we here for, for consciousness?
I don't recall the line of events, but it was that very year I recall my father getting in a nasty fight with my mother. Tears streaming down both of their faces. He was supposed to take me to go play tennis, but they were having a heated argument. I'm not sure how many decibals it was, but you could most definitely hear the fight from outside. I sat outside in the garage and cried.
I think that was the year my father died on the inside. He used to insist on doing things his way, but from then on it was my mother's way the whole way. He even pulls me aside from time to time, and tells me that if he could do things his way, he'd have me do this and that, or that he'd be on his way to vacation elsewhere.
In the first grade, the teacher moved my "good child" marker from green to yellow for not falling the rules. I bawled my eyes out for almost thirty minutes. I think from a young age, I had a very strong sense of morality and a desire for righteouness. Whether that's inherited or learned, I'm not certain. Or perhaps, I wanted to be docile and obedient because I didn't want to get hurt. I'm not sure. Either way, I had a strong aptitude for being just. By the time I was still sobbing, the teacher had moved my marker back to green, and I stopped crying.
I tried donating $200 to a charity in the third grade. Thinking this, I thought our class would receive the pizza party for being the biggest donors in the school, and that I'd be well-received. My teacher phoned my mother, who prompty lectured me when I got home. I tried to be good, but my mother stopped me.
Now that I look back, I had a profound sense of righteouness. I was highly religious when I did my communion schooling, so much that my father pulled me out and explained to me that God was not real.
I remember the first time I lied. I told my mother something along the lines that I ate pizza instead of a hamburger at school that day. I promptly felt incredibly bad about the lie, and told her the truth. I actually ate a hamburger at school for lunch that day. She said "okay" and continued her cooking duties. I realized that day that sometimes some lies don't matter.
I was clueless and not well-received by my classmates for the most part. I did not have many friends. I was strange, eccentric. I recall in middle school a classmate recounted her experiences with my in Kindergarten (though I do not remember,) telling me I would hit my hand with a plastic toy frying pan because it was fun. I was an eccentric, weird kid from the very beginning.
I'd chase around a girl I liked in the second grade. On the playground. I'm not sure where I learned that sort of harrassment behaviour, but I did it. I'll admit it. Maybe it's that boys like teasing girls they like. Somehow, I feel a bit of vomit building up in my throat saying these things, I feel awful for it and perhaps it'd be best I isolate myself from real society for quite some time.
I also followed a boy around in third grade. He was annoyed and told his aunt, another school teacher, to leave me alone. She told me off and I prompted sulked under the playground by myself.
I'm not sure why I was like that. Or why exactly I did those things. I'm not sure why I was so different. I spent the majority of my elementary school years alone and sulking.
Even at church school I'd cry and be alone. I just, well, didn't know how to get along with others. The only boys I got along with were two awkward, tall South African twins in elementary school. They were disliked and treated ill by everyone else, but weirdos have never made me feel uncomfortable. I still remember them to this day.
From a very young age, I have been very accepting and accomodating of other people's differences. I realize now that some people seem to interpret me as judgemental though. I'm not certain exactly what I am. Perhaps I am both depending on the context.
In middle school and high school the story was the same. I won't recount it out of tiredness and laziness, I am too tired to keep going about it.
But frankly, recollecting my memories of elementary school made me think about who I am as a person. The yelling in my house, being told to pity my mother by my grandmother, the language barrier with my grandparents, and all of the beatings and verbal abuse. I'm not sure.
Recounting these memories don't make me feel any better to be honest. I was better off focusing on the future and trying to push forward with my life. Trying to come up with paradigms, reassessing my meta-thinking, and trying to understand what direction to head might feel like a better use of my words than trying to go backwards and lifting rocks to check what's been smushed underneath.
To stop being influenced by others, to choose my own path, is that even possible?
Is it even possible to "choose your own fate?" If there is not free will, and even if there were; the possible choices and ideas you can choose from are all deterministically chosen by your experience of life. You cannot come up with something completely and entirely new that is not based on the senses of the world.
I'm not sure. I'm not exactly sure what I want to spend my life on, or how I want to form my personality, or what direction I want to go. I still don't know, and I'm still running out of time. I'm turning twenty-four in a couple days and it's dawning on me that it's too much too fast.
What should I do with this life?
I'm looking online, searching the phrase up, over and over again, but really, what should I do with my life? I have so many weeks left to live, and I'm squandering it by watching shitty InstagramTikTok short form videos and frying my prain and neurotransmitters. I'm rewiring my brain to love that short-form content and completely blow up my attention span and sense of conscious being. What the hell am I doing?
Jean Valjean is the protagonist of Viktor Hugo's Les Miserables.
I'm a bit tired of it all. Trying to figure out what to do. Who to talk to. New people to meet. The whole process seems, well, exhausting and needless. Why not do the things I enjoy? Or perhaps, the things that make me feel better in the long-term?
We say you should do as you like, and that doing what others expect or want from you is wrong. That doing what you should do as you like is right. But isn't that a moral judgement? It's deeply rooted in individualism, but regardless of abstraction, it's a decision that society is forcing down on you and saying that this is what you should do. "You should act according to your intellectual or emotional base desires." "You should not act according to what society or others expect of you."
It's a judgement. It's a statement. A proposition. One that may not necessarily be even true, just one that is widely accepted by the collective delusion of everyone. Perhaps in a century, or even a couple centuries, we'll look back and ask what kind of society was being run back then, or perhaps, maybe not even at all.
I don't know. Perhaps I'll try meditating.
Cheers.