My Life In the Bush of Ghosts

[nyuanshin]

Here is an illustration of the manifold costs of ressentimentWhile sitting in a coffee shop reading, I overhear some guy sitting behind me running his yap about how "people who think there's a cure for cancer don't understand what it is" and how, apparently, it just happens like death and taxes. (Actually, it was worse: he threw in more painfully

Comments

[queueball]

I have a sudden and strong suspicion that the profound change in the way I choose to engage with people (or not) since college, including the " humanity" categories I've been driving at, are post-hoc reasoning for the thought process in your last few paragraphs. It's a re-categorization of a huge portion of inputs into the "not my jurisdiction, nevermind it" category, carried on at an other-than-conscious level. (I could read the same into my similar religious-grade aversion to do-gooding that developed a few years ago after a handful of very bad experiences.)

Turning "it's not serious, it's just the passing scene" into a religion has done wonders for my attitude, my rationality, the background super-high level of deadly stress hormones in my blood. Yet the value of this would be hard to explain to someone who hasn't had to make the adaptation. It fits.

[nyuanshin]

Having do-gooding blow up in my face repeatedly over the years apparently hasn't extinguished the urge, though my capacity to throttle it has increased markedly.

Up to now I've had reservations about going full bore in the direction you allude to, but I suspect now that it might be the only way I can eliminate this problem -- by marking it all "not serious". My body needs to know it's "just a game" before I can learn to play it competently.

[queueball]

Apropos of nothing, I think it has increased my sensitivity to things that matter and virtually eliminated my concern with several classes of things that don't. It's not a particularly fine-grained recategorization, but it doesn't have to be: so much of what gets your blood boiling on a day to day basis is noise that very little signal is lost if you redefine huge portions of it. It used to be that if I got upset over something, all I knew is that one of my buttons had been pushed. That wasn't very telling. Now, if I get upset over something, it points to something that really matters in the outside world, to an inner demon I need to deal with, or both. That alone is very useful data. When an innocent grandmother gets Tasered by drug warriors, I still get pissed off; when a net-nut libertarian and a net-nut leftie argue about it (or their equivalents at a coffeeshop do so next to me), I'm mostly unaffected by their bickering. The passion remains where it matters.

[nyuanshin]

This bodes well.

[selfishgene]

Good ideas.
One person can't compete with the massive disinformation spewed by the establishment. Trying to combat ignorance on a retail level is futile. I would only bother explaining reality if I had a good existing relationship with someone who seemed otherwise sensible - even then it usually fails.

[nyuanshin]

See, my problem has become more fundamental: it's not even about "explaining reality", because for that to mean anything I'd need to know what reality is, which I'm increasingly aware that I don't (though I have a pretty good lock on a lot of things it *isn't*). It adds an extra layer of difficulty in dialoging with people who haven't spent enough time rooting around in their own epistemology to become appropriately skeptical, which I'm hard-pressed to overcome -- other than by rhetorically steamrollering them into a state of doubt, which feels like cheating.

But this makes the point even stronger: some part of me has still not fully internalized the enormity of the opportunity cost of correcting individual errors, relative to investing my attention in methods of correcting many errors all at one go.