The Pagan Agenda

I want to untangle the lines of communication if only partially in order to address a higher level issue that so often goes unsaid (my sense of decorum is already flaring up and I haven’t even started to transgress anything). I want to talk about the ego as it pertains to communication. I want to talk about the passive meanings of everything I have written and will write, and have said and will say as a result of my quality of being confronting your quality of being, and vice versa. I want to talk about this because the awareness of this consumes me, often to the point of inhibiting my true feelings from ever being conveyed, and I can only imagine the same is the case for everyone else. In this sense the ‘Victorian ethic’ has never left the social arena, and we are fundamentally at odds with the dichotomy between our private feelings and our public expressions. My complaint is that what is presently considered the appropriate level of censorship of our thoughts in the social arena – and by ‘appropriate level’ I mean that which I interpret through my own sense of decorum – is far too inhibiting to be considered beneficial for either party.

This may very well be my own personal problem but I highly doubt it, although neither do I believe it is everyone’s problem, but let’s say a large majority of people, which I am able to suppose through observation and interaction. A certain degree of inhibition is probably a good thing, and I would never want to convey everything in my head, if only because I take a certain pride in my singular awareness, which I think is central to ‘ego’. I believe the ego has a right to be proud because as individuals we are all genuinely unique in that each of us have in our repertoire of thoughts, memories, emotions, a singular development in time and place to draw from. The confrontation of egos in social interaction is natural enough and justifiable on this basis. In this sense i agree with Nietzsche that a fanatic suppression of our potentialities for the sake of religious piety is a waste of life, and the same goes for doctrines of socialism. We must embrace our egos as a defining characteristic in our development and not be ashamed of it.

I am an egoist. Periodically I feel ashamed about being so, and to some extent this shame is good in that it can prevent me from entering the next phase: megalomania. A degree of skepticism is always good when believing anything. Nonetheless, for the large part of my time I am convinced that I understand the world better than those around me, and by better I mean I have learned to salvage a desirable life out of the web of social politics, a desirable life that is virtually anxiety free and self-enriching. I have learned to adapt to my surroundings in ways that may seem unorthodox, but which suit my personal grasp of value quite well. Of course purely relying on this personal intuition is a very dangerous thing to do, and I have not always been so successful, but I think over time one learns to listen to the right voice. at its worst social decorum inhibits intuition, and the habitual exhibition of one’s public persona may adversely cause the individual to divert his/her attention away from the ‘inner voice’. I don’t think there is anything profoundly mystical to this voice, this intuition, and it need not be marginalized as such; after all, one can easily accept that the mind has a modular ability to trigger remembrances of lived experiences that guide the individual towards making educated choices. I hypothesize that the problem with the majority of people is they have inversed the importance of this task of the mind with the task of mirroring the responses of other people. Rather than integrate fully the modularity of the mind these individuals habitually parrot the world around them to the point of estrangement from their own personal intuitions.

This is part of a larger trend I sense in modern society which consists of an inversion of social and individual concerns, to the detriment of personal identity. I have spent a considerable amount of time in this blog attempting to marginalize the significance of encroaching belief-structures, such as scientific realism and organized religions, in the interest of emphasizing the faith-based foundations of all premises and the wrong-headedness of engaging these belief-structures on the assumption of their intrinsic superior authority. The authority of a worldview must stem from an internal authority, one that considers your lived experience repertoire. all other authorities are subject to the relativistic substrate that underlies all belief-structures. My own sentiments on the matter of the value of these belief-structures such as scientific realism and Buddhism is that we can imbue them with authority but this does not give them independent authority. it is a characteristic of our ontology, which I term ‘doublethink’ (after Orwell), which allocates authority to a plurality of opposing views without any sense of contradiction. We need only appreciate our innate capacity for paradoxical beliefs to understand that we are more inclined and indeed ontologically conditioned to a doublethink-enhanced belief than we are to upholding any one doctrine of belief. Further arguments on the viability of doublethink can be read here.

Another way this social decorum marginalizes self-referencing and the value of intuition is through language itself. This relates to Wittgenstein’s idea of language-games via a subcategory which may be classified as the ‘academic language-game’. Anyone who has had a higher education understands this game: we are taught and indeed graded according to our ability to reference sources deemed ‘academically’ sound which we gradually learn to identify by their locality in reputable publications and by the structural quality of their views, which include an excessive amount of jargon and detailed footnoting. After four years of undergraduate indoctrination in this respect it becomes a very difficult habit to overcome, and even now I admittedly fall back into academic language-games in order to convey my ideas. Doing so has residual benefits; for example, by imitating the style of some of the more lucid academic papers one can formulate a disciplined structure to the ideas that more directly conveys the content. However, the cultural import of the academic style is impossible to divorce from the content, both in the implementation and reception of it. Its hierarchal assertion is passively imbued in the style and may affect the way it is interpreted by the reader. As such, I imagine some of my attempts to be rigid with my entries and employ technical jargon have affected the way my ideas were construed, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. The actual content of these entries may not have been the determining factor for the final opinion, but rather the style’s passive smack of elitism or, inversely, academic credence. I know of no way to convey my feelings sincerely without resorting to these passive meanings of our language. the predominance of academically enhanced modes of communication continue to downplay the importance of the unstructured spontaneity of individual expression… and before it is even fully articulated the audience may already have determined its value.

I particularly dislike the academic conceit that terms are inflexible, which has a residual effect on our ability to use words, at least some of time. for example, as a result of this academic culture the word ‘intuition’ I used previously has a passive connotation of ‘mysticism’, simply because it does not correspond with the conventional wisdom of this culture. Similarly, ‘faith’ is ‘irrationalism’, ‘ego’ is a psycho-analytic term and is thus imbued with all the individual understands of that meaning. Of course these terms are not limited to these impressions, but insofar as a culture of academia pervades western society these are the prominent sentiments, and it is to this extent I see the individual marginalized further through the appropriation of language itself.

We all have a uniqueness we need to foster and defend in the face of encroaching belief-structures which give the illusion of hierarchal authority. Pride is not a bad thing, the ego is not a bad thing. Learning how to adapt to the world in a way that reflects your intuition of value is essential to genuine happiness. Simply following the herd and parroting the outside world will not ensure anything but a consistent anxiety because it implies that you must always conform yourself to an outward model of value which you have no authority over. While I do agree with Wittgenstein that ‘private language’ is a chimera I still believe there is a capacity to self-ref prior to verbal articulation, which is by some called ‘tacit knowledge’, by others ‘intuition’, but all the same it is a capacity of profound value in regards to determining personal satisfaction.