So, what next?

Bec and I are busy teaching our little girl the social niceties. How to be polite, considerate, etc. And then I remembered this xkcd comic from a few weeks ago:

Why do we behave the way we do? A lot of it depends on the conditioning we are exposed to as children, conditioning that we are actively imposing on our daughter right now. But if we are able to overcome that conditioning, what then?

Anarchy? Chaos? Disorder?

Almost certainly.

We live in dense populations in regular close contact with thousands of other humans who we don't know and will probably never know. So why should we care about them? Because without social rules then we would descend into a mass of violence and depredation from which only the strong few would arise (thank you Charles Darwin). And there is a hierarchy to the conditioning that is applied to keep people in line:
1. The truly uneducated are made to fear posthumous retribution via religious indoctrination.
2. The general masses are made to fear punishment under laws imposed by the ruling elite.
3. A small few recognise the need for social order and voluntarily abide by appropriate moral guidelines.

Of course there are many to whom none of these apply, notably criminals and sociopaths. And the more intelligent one is the easier it is to bypass these controls; there is a known correlation between lower intellect and blind religious observance, smart criminals can evade the police (and frequently do), and a self-imposed moral code is inherently arbitrary.

The alt-tag to the above comic is "Sometimes I'm terrified by how many options other people have."

Rightly so.

Maybe we've got it wrong. Maybe the outcome of the breakdown of social order will be that, following the death of most humans at each other's hands, the Earth will return to an equilibrium that has been long since disturbed by our "social niceties".

Three Blind Mice

There is a spot on each of your retinas where the optic nerve connects. This spot has no rods and no cones and hence is unable to interpret light that falls on it, rendering you blind to the corresponding point in your field of vision. These are not the blind spots I am about to talk about.

Each of us has behaviours and attitudes that we aren't aware we possess (Google "Johari Window"). These are the undercurrents of our lives that cause reactions we don't always understand; they aren't necessarily bad things but they easily can be. Certainly they can be uncomfortable to deal with when we are presented with them.

How do we know what we don't know? Ask someone you trust.

Really, really trust.

They are going to hold up a mirror to your soul and you may not like what you see. They may tell you that your attitude to drinking verges on alcoholism. Or that you seem to have an uncanny knack for butting in to everyone's conversations. Or that you are stifling your child's development by closing them off from the world. Or that you are too generous in offering to help others. Or that your behaviour is so flirtatious that you give people the wrong impression.

Welcome to the Abyss.

If you can accept what this person tells you (and remember that they are taking a bigger risk than you in telling you the truth) then you have a chance to learn more about yourself and grow as a person. If you can't, I recommend buying a good pair of sunglasses to disguise the problem with your eyes.

Drama, drama, drama

I don't really watch much TV, and when I do it tends to be sport or documentaries (my favourite flavour of soma). I certainly don't watch soaps, sit-coms or otherwise dramatic shows because I find that there is quite enough drama in my life as it is. But why is there drama in my life? Why can't I just have a quiet day at the office followed by a quiet dinner with my family and a quiet evening at home? I am fairly convinced that the answer is all around me, and it is thus:

We are all so desperate for attention that we will go to extraordinary lengths to get it.

I blame the media for this (and a bunch of other things which will no doubt come out over the life of my blog). We are force-fed celebrity culture through magazines, websites, billboards and TV shows until it becomes an ingrained element of our social fabric. We all want to be celebrities, and we can't, because if everyone was a celebrity then no-one would be. And the truth is that we are struggling to be noticed as one amongst countless millions. In frustration we increase the drama in our lives until we get the level of attention we subconsciously desire. Holden and Ford drivers race each other along suburban roads, each desperate for their little piece of Mount Panorama. People hold loud conversations on their mobile phones in case anyone else wants in. Facial expressions are exaggerated, language is more obscene, piercings are more prominent and tattoos more prevalent.

Look at me. LOOK AT ME!!


At least The Joker had the decency to know he was insane.

Did you know you were an addict?

I have very specific tastes when it comes to books, and I don't tend to pay much attention when people say I should read things. If I want to read it then I will; nothing anybody says will usually convince me otherwise. My wife, however, is very persuasive in her own way, so after several years of prompting I finally relented and read Huxley's Brave New World. And it gave me word I hadn't realised I was missing:

Soma.

In the book soma is the drug fed to the masses to keep them blissed out and under control. But it neatly applies to so much of our modern life that I feel it should be a more widely-used term. Commercial television is soma. Spectator sports are soma. Fast food is soma. Alcohol and the drinking culture are soma. Even (light your flamers) religion is soma. All of them drugs designed to keep us distracted from the harsher realities of our existence so that we play nicely with each other and maintain the social order.

Personally I've never been a fan of drug addiction.

Grow Up? You First...

I'm a big kid. I play games with little toy soldiers, read books about Dwarves and Goblins, and watch movies largely concerned with spaceships. I dream about owning a Corvette Stingray and painting it maroon and white. I play romping games with my kids as an equal, not a parent. And I couldn't be happier.

Who the hell wants to grow up, really?

The grown-up world is full of all sorts of insanity. With a nod to Scott Adams, we spend the best years of our lives in a fabric-covered box to earn money to pay the bank and the government. We consume media which is determined by committees to be socially acceptable and highly marketable. We eat fast food which is identical in thirty-one thousand restaurants around the world. And we obey rules handed to us by ancient books, stilted societies and conservative governments.

And we do all of this without question.

Fuck that.

I challenge every one of you to the following:

1. Spend an hour running around naked. Kids do it without shame or fear, you can do it too.
2. Unplug your TV, and turn off your phone and your computer for a whole day. It won't kill you and the world will still be there when you get back.
3. Play a game of cops and robbers with your best friend. Or maybe hide and seek.
4. Run around in the local park until you're so exhausted you can barely stand up.
5. Go to the lolly shop and ask what you can get for $10 (financial progress being what it is ;-)
6. And for God's sake, laugh the whole time through.

We need a better social order, one that we want and not just one that we inherit. Go out there, break a few moulds, and find it. Because before our kids "grow up", they've already got it all figured out.

I Know Nothing

My four-year-old daughter proudly decreed in the car tonight that she knows "almost everything." "Really?" "Yup," she replied confidently, "it's true." I envy her deeply, for alas I am not a very knowledgeable person; in fact I can think of only one thing that I know.

I know that I exist.

Everything else comes down to confidence and faith. I am confident that other people exist; I have faith that we share a common burden of doubts and aspirations. I am confident that scientific method delivers an improving set of principles with which to understand our reality; I have faith that there is a higher order to the Universe that that method will one day uncover. I am confident that my daughter will grow into a powerful young woman; I have faith that she will live that long.

The truth is, we know nothing. All we can ever do is evaluate what we observe and interpret that as best we can. Some things we will be reasonably sure of; these are the things in which we are confident. Others we must take at face value or with a level of uncertainty; these are the things in which we have faith. Overall our understanding and experience of the world is guided by what we have faith and confidence in, and they are in turn guided by what we understand and experience. And somewhere in there is that small kernel of inalienable truth: I think, therefore I am.

The Double-ended Sword

Cast your mind back about a decade: D&D 3rd ed had just come out and with it came the absolutely absurd concept of "double-weapons". These were basically a pole with, say, a flail on one end and a sword on the other. The idea was that you could wield this contraption as two weapons in combat. Leaving aside the fact that two individual weapons would be far more manageable and less stupid, if you ever tried to use the damn thing in combat all you would actually end up doing is braining yourself with the flail while you tried to slash your opponent.

What has this got to do with anything?

Perception and Expectation are the double-weapon we beat ourselves up with every day of our lives. We carry them around like the aforementioned unwieldy pole allowing them to generally get in the way, hurt the people around us, and bash us over the head when we try to use them. When we are expecting something and it doesn't materialise we can't help but feel disappointed - yet we set the expetation in the first place. As we observe the world we exercise choice over what we perceive those observations to mean - yet we accept that modified perception as truth. And when we hear an ambiguous statement we twist the words into what we were expecting to hear - the worst of both weapons. We determine our own expectations and twist the truth through our perceptions, setting ourselves up for disappointment and failure.

I could go into a lovely analogy about breaking the weapons apart and using them separately, but instead I will say this: Put the weapons down. Do not cloud your observations with what you perceive in your head; instead view the world and those in it with a fresh mind at all times. Do not allow expectations to cause disappointment or distress; instead revel in the joy of all things as they happen every day.

And if you're going to play D&D 3rd Ed, don't pick a character with a double-weapon. Because you're just being a knob.