(no subject)
May. 5th, 2010 01:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionOnce upon a time there was a planet whose leaders were wrong. This was obvious because so many people were hungry, bankrupt, injured, discriminated against, uneducated, jobless, imprisoned, underpaid, unsafe, and unhappy.
A group of the planet's leading non-leaders convened and decided the problem was the leaders. They convinced the people, a great war was fought and won, the leaders were exiled, and the leaderly nonleaders assumed their place. Many had died but not enough changed.
A new generation grew up and with it a fresh crop of leading nonleaders, who met in secret and decided that the problem was not which people were in charge, but that anyone was. Beyond this they were unable to agree, and because of their principled objection to leadership itself they had little political cohesiveness and accomplished nothing obvious.
The generation following considered them failures, and their top nonleaders decided instead that the problem was not who the leaders were or whether there were leaders at all but how the leaders thought. Wrongness came into the leaders from somewhere--not all of the problem was selfishness, or if it was then surely that too was wrong. Everyone knows the selfish are unhappy, at least a little bit.
This generation decided it would discover the truth and make it known to the whole world. The people would tolerate no nonsense from their leaders, who would thus become mere functionaries obeying the facts, as interpreted by the most accurate methods available. They shook hands and went their separate ways, as each had his or her own ideas about where and how the truth might be found. Some declared they had found it at once, but on examining one another's truths were confused or offended and parted ways in disgust. Others disappeared into their quests, perhaps died seeking.
Their leading nonleading successors were a chastened bunch, and met in a quiet meadow under a dark, weeping glacier. They wordlessly decided it was all this talk that was the problem. They then wandered toward their homes, but became listless, sat down, slumped over and died over the ensuing years.
The last generation realized that meeting had to happen and that speaking had to happen and that some were bound to lead and that just who didn't matter so much but that the truth would never be agreed upon. They decided that people who believed themselves when they spoke were the problem, since disagreement would then be irrelevant. They attacked people's reasons for believing they were speaking the truth, or that truth was something that even could be spoken, or that speaking was something that truly happened. These attacks took the form of carefully aimed questions, asking how one could be sure of X when Y was so--every single thing the people of the planet did not yet clearly understand about themselves or their ideas or their language provided a handy Y source. This generation of leading nonleaders could not flat-out say that any given X was simply wrong, of course, as that denial would form a new X-type proposition, open to undermining by the nearest Y. All they could do was question.
The questions did three things to the people questioned, depending on who they were. One fairly tiny group came to understand what they were doing, looked to the questioning position itself as the one place of safety and joined them at it. I couldn't say whether they did this (1) out of fear of uncertainty--since infinite questioning is the only response tactic that can keep up with infinite questioning, hence be sure of what to do and say next (question!)--or (2) out of the hope that they could help spread this skepticism to all the leaders and all the people and thereby create happiness--since all the evils still afflicting the world must surely be positive ones stemming from people being too sure of their arbitrary, self-flattering notions of the truth--or (3) out of the love of a real but very limited sort of power--since everyone not yet adopting the same tactic could be intimidated or annoyed with it as much as one liked, since the only responses that could outflank totalizing skepticism would be the same right back or just walking away. A second group, consisting of the planet's leaders and the great mass of its people, just walked away and learned to ignore all nonleaders. (It was not immediately clear if this made things take a turn for the worse: had the leading nonleaders been putting some kind of limit to the mistakes of the leaders just by being near them and near to the people, while speaking in a language they all understood?)
The third group tried their best to explain why infinite questioning is not a great idea, in part because it is not even possible, hence not even quite what one is doing when one thinks one is infinitely questioning. It was met with infinite questioning--and remember, I mean questioning of the variety, "If Y is so, how can X be? Not that I'm saying it isn't." At first the members of the third group just waited for the idiot questioners to realize their tactic was not bringing about the end of the world's evils; soon, though, they concluded that the motives of sadism or fear of hazing--(3) and (1) above--might be in play, or that those swayed by the promise of (2) before they had examined the evidence for and against it might have become deaf to evidence itself once they started questioning, since evidence was as open to question as anything else and without it they were free to think of themselves as heroes (though of course at the same time not really think they were heroes). As the world either continued to begin or started to end, the third group realized the truth might really have to be found after all.
A group of the planet's leading non-leaders convened and decided the problem was the leaders. They convinced the people, a great war was fought and won, the leaders were exiled, and the leaderly nonleaders assumed their place. Many had died but not enough changed.
A new generation grew up and with it a fresh crop of leading nonleaders, who met in secret and decided that the problem was not which people were in charge, but that anyone was. Beyond this they were unable to agree, and because of their principled objection to leadership itself they had little political cohesiveness and accomplished nothing obvious.
The generation following considered them failures, and their top nonleaders decided instead that the problem was not who the leaders were or whether there were leaders at all but how the leaders thought. Wrongness came into the leaders from somewhere--not all of the problem was selfishness, or if it was then surely that too was wrong. Everyone knows the selfish are unhappy, at least a little bit.
This generation decided it would discover the truth and make it known to the whole world. The people would tolerate no nonsense from their leaders, who would thus become mere functionaries obeying the facts, as interpreted by the most accurate methods available. They shook hands and went their separate ways, as each had his or her own ideas about where and how the truth might be found. Some declared they had found it at once, but on examining one another's truths were confused or offended and parted ways in disgust. Others disappeared into their quests, perhaps died seeking.
Their leading nonleading successors were a chastened bunch, and met in a quiet meadow under a dark, weeping glacier. They wordlessly decided it was all this talk that was the problem. They then wandered toward their homes, but became listless, sat down, slumped over and died over the ensuing years.
The last generation realized that meeting had to happen and that speaking had to happen and that some were bound to lead and that just who didn't matter so much but that the truth would never be agreed upon. They decided that people who believed themselves when they spoke were the problem, since disagreement would then be irrelevant. They attacked people's reasons for believing they were speaking the truth, or that truth was something that even could be spoken, or that speaking was something that truly happened. These attacks took the form of carefully aimed questions, asking how one could be sure of X when Y was so--every single thing the people of the planet did not yet clearly understand about themselves or their ideas or their language provided a handy Y source. This generation of leading nonleaders could not flat-out say that any given X was simply wrong, of course, as that denial would form a new X-type proposition, open to undermining by the nearest Y. All they could do was question.
The questions did three things to the people questioned, depending on who they were. One fairly tiny group came to understand what they were doing, looked to the questioning position itself as the one place of safety and joined them at it. I couldn't say whether they did this (1) out of fear of uncertainty--since infinite questioning is the only response tactic that can keep up with infinite questioning, hence be sure of what to do and say next (question!)--or (2) out of the hope that they could help spread this skepticism to all the leaders and all the people and thereby create happiness--since all the evils still afflicting the world must surely be positive ones stemming from people being too sure of their arbitrary, self-flattering notions of the truth--or (3) out of the love of a real but very limited sort of power--since everyone not yet adopting the same tactic could be intimidated or annoyed with it as much as one liked, since the only responses that could outflank totalizing skepticism would be the same right back or just walking away. A second group, consisting of the planet's leaders and the great mass of its people, just walked away and learned to ignore all nonleaders. (It was not immediately clear if this made things take a turn for the worse: had the leading nonleaders been putting some kind of limit to the mistakes of the leaders just by being near them and near to the people, while speaking in a language they all understood?)
The third group tried their best to explain why infinite questioning is not a great idea, in part because it is not even possible, hence not even quite what one is doing when one thinks one is infinitely questioning. It was met with infinite questioning--and remember, I mean questioning of the variety, "If Y is so, how can X be? Not that I'm saying it isn't." At first the members of the third group just waited for the idiot questioners to realize their tactic was not bringing about the end of the world's evils; soon, though, they concluded that the motives of sadism or fear of hazing--(3) and (1) above--might be in play, or that those swayed by the promise of (2) before they had examined the evidence for and against it might have become deaf to evidence itself once they started questioning, since evidence was as open to question as anything else and without it they were free to think of themselves as heroes (though of course at the same time not really think they were heroes). As the world either continued to begin or started to end, the third group realized the truth might really have to be found after all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 02:44 pm (UTC)my personal experience in variation was:
once upon a time there was a person whose leader was wrong. this was obvious because the person was bankrupt, heartbroken, unprofitably-educated, jobless/underpaid, and unhappy.
this particular person spent far too long letting the infinite questioners run the show.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-07 12:53 am (UTC)but personhood is an active synthesis of an amalgam. the way grashupfer phrases it really resonates: my moods do not believe in one another.
all reasoned actions are based on an evolving philosophy.
people will say 'the way i acted was not in my best interests.'
well why wouldn't one always be acting in one's own best interests?
excepting for the moment errors based in failures of reason, why do we have errors based in failures of judgment?
so the infinite questioners just represent an aspect of the self. the acceptance of that group philosophy as a personal philosophy. because individuals face the same dilemmas you've described in groups; when one takes one's reasoned actions, what is the underlying philosophy one chooses?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-07 02:00 am (UTC)