11

It’s kind of awesome how flaking on people works. I mean that. It shows a feint of unreliability, in a world where reliability is all that matters. Where we “Know nothin’ in life but bein’ legit.” I like it though, unreliability is the blank space where I can insert my own answer to what may have happened. Like some sort of metaphysical mad-lib, I can make this boring simple life of mine twisted into any number of possibilities and nobody remains accountable. This is my definition of philosophy.

Its like bureaucracy, or something that I would describe in that context. The system-over-the-individual-ness that systems to that effect generate. Confusing, I know.
Think of it in another term though, like describing the wind to a child. You really won’t describe ‘the wind’ but rather the effects of the wind.*

In this sense, the wind isn’t there. We can only show what the wind did, but if we come back to the site where my tree was blown over, we might ask, “So where is the wind now.” And I would respond honestly: “I don’t know.”

In this way Its like a perfect little system. Its like the graffiti subculture, you must participate to be a member. Participation may require work, danger (both physical and psychological) money for supplies, money for travel, money for representation. But it’s only qualification is participation, thereby making voyeurs to this system appear as cowards. This becomes a sociological context when one considers that rebellion in any context is still rebellion and dissent has no boundaries.

The problem is kind of simple but important. In a complex system such as this, discovery and development are one in the same, with relatively few places left to discover our development as a whole is growing more and more limited. I think we are restrained by our own sense of grandeur, I don’t think that a suburban shopping center is necessarily more interesting or more fulfilling than the hiking trail that was there previously but the decision was not mine to make. Not that I agree with the one that was made either. The more I wrestle with the thought of why that plot of native plants was killed to make a parking lot with a Starbucks and a Target, the more I realize that we are a species of quantity over quality that even I have no control of.

So in this place it becomes really easy to see the force of nature that we are. Even that becomes quite profound very quickly. Consider that a severe snowstorm that might hold one back for several hours is analogous to something like rush-hour traffic, which takes place daily. I mean the simple impact of our numbers alone has a downward-causation effect that is comparable to something like living in a constant hurricane. This is not an exaggeration.
  

To this end, I guess it is a series of conflicting systems; family with work, work with government, government with politics, politics with nature and so on. Of course there is no hierarchy, all these conflicting systems on various levels of interaction. Each gaining or loosing influence based on how much you interact with it. In a way, almost self-fulfilling.

  

*(theres nothing there to the apparent eye, but there is a specific sound, there is a motion to the trees that is characteristic of wind, that people become accustomed to and associate with wind)