You want to see in here?
Welcome to the room. At first it’s big enough. There are only a few words that float around the middle. You can catch them. Organize them. Sentence them. Tick them. Benign words. They will not hurt you.
I didn’t see them get in, but the others are here. They know the parameters of this space. They hit the depths and ricochet from the heights. Watch them! They want out. Search for escape. In vain.
The walls make them angry. Each time they hit they gain momentum. At first I can catch them. Arms flail. Body exhausts. But I harbour their malignancy. Contained, but restless. Pulsating. Eager to wreak havoc. They slip from my grip.
Now they are free. It’s tight in here. The walls confine. Define. Atrophy. Dangerously venomous words. Each time you hit you mutate. Leave a firework trail behind. Scatter your poison in here. Falling like stars. You shower. Burn. Damage. Disfigure. Bait me to chase. To play. To run myself. Ragged.
You are cleverer than me. So tell me how to get out. But you don’t want to save. Only to harm. To debilitate. To impoverish. To wear down to a shard. A sliver. A silver. Blade.
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble
For those asking what you can do to help, please link to visiblechildren.tumblr.com wherever you see KONY 2012 posts. And tweet a link to this page to famous people on Twitter who are talking about KONY 2012!
I do not doubt for a second that those involved in KONY 2012 have great intentions, nor…
What is considered to be a “normal person” in society? Is it subjective or objective?
We can identify two kinds of normal. One kind is “average”, which refers to common behaviour and attributes among a group of people. The other kind is “functional”, which is the effectiveness of a person’s behaviour in the world and society. The latter sense is well-described in the phrase “normal is whatever works for you”.
It becomes a problem when the two meanings get confused. Average behaviour isn’t the same as functional behaviour - conformance may yield short-term security in the face of predators, but it’s a fundamentally insecure and naive position. Both predators and prey benefit from the dynamics of herds and will aid in deprecating difference and increasing conformance.
Functional behaviour is maximized by using both strategy and reason to determine independent action - it can include conformity as a component, but always does so in the context of a greater individual strategy. For an individual this is a more general and useful concept of normal than conformity, since it allows greater freedom of action and opportunities for success. The trade-off is that it involves greater risk and mental effort.
Our brains have evolved to resolve/ignore conflicting input and internal contradictions - it’s how we make sense of the world, and perfection generally hinders survival and reproduction rather than helping it. In addition, our images of ourselves in the context of society is biased by a privileged point of view.
Looking at other people, though, it’s easy to compare individuals against each other and against the average. Our brains are pretty good at detecting and recognizing features - the ability to ignore imperfections helps here, it lets us see the pattern instead of the bits. However, we are influenced by the patterns we know and expect.
When we try to view ourselves in comparison to others, it can create a feedback loop which amplifies the value of the differences we observe. Such feedback is naturally dampened by our brains (less for some than others), but this restricts our ability to judge ourselves.
So we’re poor judges of ourselves and biased judges of others.
It’s very hard to deny free will intuitively : if I do something, it happens. “Doing” works and one can’t just shake that feeling. But it’s also possible, to an incredible, and arguably infinite, amount to understand the causes of events and actions. That is, to assign and memorize correlations between several events and facts. One can think of an immense amount of reasons explaining one thing, on several levels; those each have a scope, a mechanism and a “generalness”, or a specificness, that are different. They are different ideas, that are invoked each in a specific way, depending on the mechanism they’re in : I can see a feeling from the neurochemical point of view, and talk about how the molecules of such secretion will be inhibited, triggering such molecular behavior… Or from an existential/aesthetic point of view, and think of how I feel in an unusual state, and that the space around me seems to contract, expand or writhe about.
That variety of levels on which to speak of the reality, and of different elements in relation between themselves in each of those levels, is a vast potentiality for the mind to organize a rational speech in, and it could be argued whether this potentiality is indeed infinite. It is that potentiality for expression, creativity and knowledge that the term “free will” seeks to reduce, and effectively collapse, into one single, unexplicable notion tantamounting to an absolute, undetermined, arbitrary and ultimately pointless sacralized Individual Conscience.
