weirdway

I've been bumping up against this rock for a while now, and again it's come up in today's contemplation for me. There is a funny contradiction in my mind. On one hand, I love egalitarianism. I'm always and ever campaigning for the average Joe and Jill, so to speak. I oppose all kinds of elitism, and not just the wealth type, but even the intellectual type. Where do you think my anti-jargon stance comes from? It's not an accident. It's because I oppose intellectual elitism and I believe knowledge belongs to the people. One way to make sure knowledge is open to all is to speak with as little jargon as possible, and I always deliberately strive in that manner. My anti-elitist tendencies impact my life decisions in other ways as well. So in other words, it's not just a small thing or wishful thinking. It's how I live my life in some significant and hard to ignore respects. So egalitarianism and symmetry is a huge deal for me on some level.

The basic principle of symmetry as I am discussing it here is: whatever I apply to others, or the universe as a big "The Other", is what I also must apply to myself, and the other way around. If I apply something to myself, I have to apply it to others and/or to The Other. This perspective is aligned with egalitarianism.

But there is one tiny little problem. If I want to see myself as a ground of being, then I fundamentally can't equate myself to anything that manifests within me. This perspective introduces a profound asymmetry and on a relative level, when I practice this, it inclines me toward the elitist tendencies.

I've been noticing that recently I am often happy to leave people to wallow in their ignorance while being fully content to be wise myself. Before I would never be able to rest easy until I share my wisdom so that everyone has an equal "amount" of wisdom. So if I see someone saying truly dumb things, normally I would feel obligated to correct this, not at all because of any sense of superiority, but the opposite, from a sense that if I can understand it, so can they, and if I deserve to know something, so do they. So out of a sense of egalitarianism I would bend over backwards to try to explain everything I understand and to correct as many opinions I considered were painfully clumsy and inferior. That's because I thought if wise opinions are like wealth, then the wealth should not be hoarded.

This is also why I've been opposing the various secret societies and similar type organizations. I saw and probably still see them as knowledge hoarders. They're greedy for knowledge and they don't share it equally.

But recently I've been finding myself being very comfortable in letting people wallow in their ignorance. I no longer feel as strongly as before that I must share everything I know. Sometimes I even think, oh the horror, fuck it, maybe I am just wiser and maybe others aren't meant to know what I know. When I think I am inherently superior, that's when it's very very easy for me to just smile when I read something I consider dumb, and not bother replying or making a comment. Then I get a sense that wisdom isn't meant to be for the other person. We're not equal and aren't meant to be equal. When I feel this way, I have zero desire to engage other people, especially if I think they're wrong or stupid.

In general if I am to exercise a creative principle at large, I can't apply the same principles to myself and to the world. I have to practice asymmetry. So for example, the world is created, but I am not. The world arises and passes, but I do not. The world is the surface of the will, but I am its core. When I bind the world to a set of laws, I myself don't have to bind myself to the same set, and indeed, it's better if I don't if I intend to exercise a huge amount of influence.

And you better believe even the tiniest things are huge from a metaphysical perspective. For example, even raising the body temperature is in some ways against the law of thermodynamics. But it's beyond that. Even if I thought the world was a living organism, that wouldn't be enough to control my body's temperature reliably. What if I will my temp to rise, but the mother Earth or forest spirits will it to fall? So just switching from physicalism to animism doesn't grant me a sufficient scope for many of the kinds of transformations I want to be able to manifest even at a tiny scope (in and closely around the human body say). But I don't stop at a tiny scope. Tiny scope is called "tiny" for a reason.

So in the long term I fear I will become the elite that I loathe now. I will discard symmetry and use asymmetry all over the place. And my days of fighting for the common person are probably nearing their end as well. In some ways this feels sad. In some ways I also think that common people deserve their fates, because they collectively have the power to change the whole world, and if they don't, then they deserve to live with the consequence. So fuck the common man and woman. Collectively they get what they want to get. Enough of them are greedy and property oriented to keep the whole game of capitalism afloat. Why should I help any of them? If you order a fish at a restaurant and you happen to get a fish, you can't complain. That's how I've been feeling lately and it should be obvious I can't say everything I want to say in such a short post.