Elsewhere in Dreams

I’m 26, which is pretty old in the grand scheme of things. I used to look up at 26 year old people when I was maybe 10 and think how old and mature they seemed. Of course, I was 10, and when you’re 10 you don’t exactly have an accurate outlook on the world. I was probably mistaking the confidence that generally comes with age for maturity or something.

All I know is that some revelations come disappointingly late in life. For instance, I’ve looked at the world as it were somehow binary for the longest time. It isn’t, of course, though sometimes it is. There isn’t this one great liberal political issue, and this one great conservative issue, around which entire countries revolve. The categories “liberal” and “conservative” are almost meaningless in Canada anyway. There’s no particularly sound reason a conservative can’t care about the environment and social justice, and there’s no reason a liberal can’t want sane financial management.

What I’m describing sounds a bit like a middle-of-the-road thing, but truth be told, I’m not sure that politics or life or marriage or anything can be defined in terms of roads. I used to have discussions with friends where we’d say “okay, we’ve fallen into this ditch, but we have to make sure we don’t fall in the other ditch”, as if somehow the safest thing was to stay in the middle of the road.

That’s so limiting. As if somehow everything falls into one spectrum and can be described as a point on a line. People thought this sort of thing about genetics before Mendel opened that particular door with his (apocryphal?) bean plants; you mix two things and you get a combination of two things. Yet, this isn’t true. You mix two things and you get something different, something recessive or dominant.

Biology seems aware that everything would simply fall to the median if pre-Mendelian genetics were true: diversity is good, it contributes in a large way to the health of the biosphere. In the same way when you mix liberal and conservative you don’t get some weak-kneed hybrid. You get something new, something above liberal and conservative, something that critique both and praise both and take the good from both.

Isn’t the alternative less like a position and more like a cage? As a conservative American (or even worse, a conservative American Christian), you can feel as if you positions are written for you. But are they really? Do you have to believe in trickle-down economics? Individualism? The “war on terror”? Do you have to support a neo-conservative president like Mr Bush, even when his worst excesses tower over his strengths? Are you somehow required to believe that your nation is the culmination of history, the focal point of Christianity, and the beacon for freedom the world over?

Maybe. I mean, if those things are good, by all means. I happen to think they’re not. I certainly don’t like what a lot of liberals espouse. But I don’t want to be trapped in this one mode of thinking that says “this philosophy is good” and “this philosophy is bad”.

• I feel like I just can’t get anything done at work. I can’t make promises to customers more than two days in the future, because I’m not really in control of production. If anything, I make suggestions and those higher up than me decide to ignore them. Honestly, it’s incredibly depressing, and I’m beginning to wonder why I keep trying; it’d be a lot easier and probably a lot better if I didn’t. Because if I can, every day, just, almost get what I need to get done done, I’ll never get any help. I’ll just get a snowballing workload. I’ll be my own Katamari Damacy, except at the end of the day I won’t be creating new stars. I’ll be the hollowed, burnt-out husk of one.
• I have to say that technology has taught me at least a few lessons. In view of the price drop on iPhones yesterday, in view of any version of Windows’ security and functionality before at least two service packs, and in view of the data one can lose using alpha software, I have learned that Early adopters are idiots. Sadly, early adoption is something of an internal mechanism, a natural function that can hardly be denied. Or you could put it this way: I’m an idiot, too.
• I’ll end my sentences with prepositions if I bloody well please, thank you and please come again.
• Don’t assume that anyone you know is pronouncing a Japanese word or phrase properly. According to my research, there’s about a 92% chance a Japanese person would laugh at them. Politely. On the inside.
• I like the taste of creamer. I hate myself for this.
• Interesting thought here. According to classical evolutionary biology (forgive me for accepting the premise for a moment), there is no over-arching design in evolution, there is no God meddling in the process, there is only survival of the fittest. But then, there’s no such thing of survival of the fittest, is there? It doesn’t really matter if a method of adaptation is optimal or not, only that it sucks the least. So maybe it should be Survival of the Least Awful, eh? The point is this: evolution isn’t a linear progression and you can’t say something is “better” in any real sense because it is more complex. Also, evolution can’t be said in any meaningful sense to select for truth. (Consider how your eye vibrates, for instance, and the images it ignores, it simply deletes in those moments; consider how very little of actual reality we can see with our eyes, all the spectrum that’s simply invisible to us; consider that there’s little reason that there aren’t ten senses and we’ve only evolved into five.) In that sense, we could, technically, be living in a dream world that doesn’t actually represent reality, if that dream world somehow gave humans an evolutionary advantage. What does this all mean? Well, let me put it this way: if evolution doesn’t select for truth, merely for adequacy, and your brain is a product of that process, how can you say evolution is true, since it’s a product of said possibly faulty brains? Thus you can reasonably say that classical evolution is self-defeating; any evolutionist that trusts his own reasoning tacitly believes at least some sort of a guiding force
• With that out of my head, I can finally get back to my sea of paperwork. Yay!