(no subject)
The weirdest thing about the night of February 2nd was that I've never actually had someone apply my philosophy against me before. I've espoused my viewpoint for so long and to so many people, and found so much resistance, that the very idea that I would one day run into someone who actually lived it practically wasn't something I thought could happen. Not just someone who agreed with me--I've made headway in convincing some people--but someone who could epitomize it.
And today, I am reminded of this by a thread on polyamory, in which I wrote, "What does the label gain you? Isn't friendship a way of relating with others? Isn't sex, marriage, conversation, etc. just another way of relating with others? Are these not also relationships? Where are the lines? Why are they there?"
It's a little harsher and intellectually domineering than the way it had been put to me two months ago, but the essential point is the same. Of course there is value in drawing the lines and labeling things, but where can you gain the most value and how?
I have always defined the essential relationship to be friendship. Everything else is cake. Delicious cake, but cake nonetheless. Mmm... cake. *cough* But when you strip off everything non-essential about a "relationship", when you lose the sex, the contract, the promises, all that, what you're left with is a friendship. Friendship is the essence of a positive relation between two people, and it's the foundation for everything else working well.
I think that it's possible to restructure all of society to recognize this fact.
Let me say that again: I think it's possible to completely revamp society to found itself according to friendship.
And I think it's the right thing to do. I'm not saying it's easy or that it'll take less than a couple thousand years, but you know... good to have goals that outlast a guy, neh?
At the core of my philosophy is the individual. To quote Einstein, "the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime". For the individual, we seek character, or Roosevelt's "qualities which mark a masterful people". It is important for the individual to reach past sentience and sapience into actual creativity, to flesh out their personality, and to create the noble and the sublime. As individuals, we are responsible for that.
The problem of individualism is that it is cold. Because while the individual can be an indomitable and inexorable force of creation, it remains limited in actual scope against the black backdrop of a lonely universe. To those who believe that they are the universe themselves, I can only point out that you have created me for the sake of telling you that you're wrong; that is your conundrum to untangle, and I am not interested in helping more than I have.
A different perspective on the individual is the question of where the boundary of self actually lies. Who are you? What are you? There is a well-known philosophical exercise that progressively slices off parts of you and asks if you are the same person: take away your limbs, your body, your gender, your friends, your personality, your history, etc.: there has never been a reliable answer, because there has never been a reliable boundary defined for the self. And in fact, your answer is as much a part of you as any of the questions. For people who define themselves, for instance, as dancers or athletes, slashing them physically is a deep wound; for people who are characterized by their ideals, taking that away is more effective than mere flesh wounds. It is tempting, therefore, to say that you are what you think you are, but that is not true; I leave it to you to imagine why.
So, that is the individual. Now for the human.
The individual does not become human until it has knowledge, any knowledge. This is a philosophical becoming, not a biological one, but it is important nonetheless. This bridge from the individual to the human is built by knowing something outside yourself, and bringing that something inside you: that is what love is. But I have talked enough on this subject recently, and there is no point in rehashing the same essays yet again. =)
So, there is love, and there is the reciprocation that defines friendship. What's the next step? I call it a friendship web: a network of friendships that defines the boundary of self.
This is a simple paradox: that who you are is defined by who you know: it makes no sense logically. It is captured in a number of proverbs, which I won't bother repeating. But the largeness of a person is built from the core of friends around him, and the extensions of that web beyond that. The extent to which this web reaches marks the boundary of who he is and can be. In our networked society, this is extremely far reaching: see the idea of six degrees of separation, also known as the human web.
But friendship webs are not enough. They define the limits of a human being's knowledge, and thus his potential, yes, but distant links have only minimal impact on this person: the world does not revolve around him. In order to address the Sun King problem, as I would call this, we have the idea of community. A community is not substantially different from a friendship web, but it is no longer about a single person. Instead of looking at people as friends and friends of friends, we look instead at everyone all at once, and find that they all have friends and friends of friends, and that these links blend and overlap and shift in an amazing dance of geometry. Where there is some stability, we discover community: a group of people whose knowledge and acceptance have enough symmetry and intensity to create solidarity. It does not take very much, but it takes some.
Now that we have a community, you might think that we are done. Not so! The problem of a community is the same as the problem of an individual: its insularity. Stability lends itself to stagnation, so a community must shift and change and grow. To do this, it must reach out, as a community, to other communities. This outreach is captured in its essence by trade: we now have economics: the provision of goods and services. The parallel for a friendship web is thus the networked economy; when the focus of an economy is shifted off of a single community, you have a civilization.
There are, of course, a thousand things I've failed to discuss here. Administration, for instance. I also have not shown what exactly it is that's different about my imagined society and our current one: the differences are subtle and difficult to express (I'm working on it!): but you might be able to see bits and pieces of it so far. What I've done, after all, is dissect the essential processes of society and held them up for examination, at every level I'm aware of: and while they are lacking, they are not wrong. They were evolved organically as humanity required, and they have acted sufficiently; we are still here, are we not?
But there. That's a little taste. ^_^
And today, I am reminded of this by a thread on polyamory, in which I wrote, "What does the label gain you? Isn't friendship a way of relating with others? Isn't sex, marriage, conversation, etc. just another way of relating with others? Are these not also relationships? Where are the lines? Why are they there?"
It's a little harsher and intellectually domineering than the way it had been put to me two months ago, but the essential point is the same. Of course there is value in drawing the lines and labeling things, but where can you gain the most value and how?
I have always defined the essential relationship to be friendship. Everything else is cake. Delicious cake, but cake nonetheless. Mmm... cake. *cough* But when you strip off everything non-essential about a "relationship", when you lose the sex, the contract, the promises, all that, what you're left with is a friendship. Friendship is the essence of a positive relation between two people, and it's the foundation for everything else working well.
I think that it's possible to restructure all of society to recognize this fact.
Let me say that again: I think it's possible to completely revamp society to found itself according to friendship.
And I think it's the right thing to do. I'm not saying it's easy or that it'll take less than a couple thousand years, but you know... good to have goals that outlast a guy, neh?
At the core of my philosophy is the individual. To quote Einstein, "the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime". For the individual, we seek character, or Roosevelt's "qualities which mark a masterful people". It is important for the individual to reach past sentience and sapience into actual creativity, to flesh out their personality, and to create the noble and the sublime. As individuals, we are responsible for that.
The problem of individualism is that it is cold. Because while the individual can be an indomitable and inexorable force of creation, it remains limited in actual scope against the black backdrop of a lonely universe. To those who believe that they are the universe themselves, I can only point out that you have created me for the sake of telling you that you're wrong; that is your conundrum to untangle, and I am not interested in helping more than I have.
A different perspective on the individual is the question of where the boundary of self actually lies. Who are you? What are you? There is a well-known philosophical exercise that progressively slices off parts of you and asks if you are the same person: take away your limbs, your body, your gender, your friends, your personality, your history, etc.: there has never been a reliable answer, because there has never been a reliable boundary defined for the self. And in fact, your answer is as much a part of you as any of the questions. For people who define themselves, for instance, as dancers or athletes, slashing them physically is a deep wound; for people who are characterized by their ideals, taking that away is more effective than mere flesh wounds. It is tempting, therefore, to say that you are what you think you are, but that is not true; I leave it to you to imagine why.
So, that is the individual. Now for the human.
The individual does not become human until it has knowledge, any knowledge. This is a philosophical becoming, not a biological one, but it is important nonetheless. This bridge from the individual to the human is built by knowing something outside yourself, and bringing that something inside you: that is what love is. But I have talked enough on this subject recently, and there is no point in rehashing the same essays yet again. =)
So, there is love, and there is the reciprocation that defines friendship. What's the next step? I call it a friendship web: a network of friendships that defines the boundary of self.
This is a simple paradox: that who you are is defined by who you know: it makes no sense logically. It is captured in a number of proverbs, which I won't bother repeating. But the largeness of a person is built from the core of friends around him, and the extensions of that web beyond that. The extent to which this web reaches marks the boundary of who he is and can be. In our networked society, this is extremely far reaching: see the idea of six degrees of separation, also known as the human web.
But friendship webs are not enough. They define the limits of a human being's knowledge, and thus his potential, yes, but distant links have only minimal impact on this person: the world does not revolve around him. In order to address the Sun King problem, as I would call this, we have the idea of community. A community is not substantially different from a friendship web, but it is no longer about a single person. Instead of looking at people as friends and friends of friends, we look instead at everyone all at once, and find that they all have friends and friends of friends, and that these links blend and overlap and shift in an amazing dance of geometry. Where there is some stability, we discover community: a group of people whose knowledge and acceptance have enough symmetry and intensity to create solidarity. It does not take very much, but it takes some.
Now that we have a community, you might think that we are done. Not so! The problem of a community is the same as the problem of an individual: its insularity. Stability lends itself to stagnation, so a community must shift and change and grow. To do this, it must reach out, as a community, to other communities. This outreach is captured in its essence by trade: we now have economics: the provision of goods and services. The parallel for a friendship web is thus the networked economy; when the focus of an economy is shifted off of a single community, you have a civilization.
There are, of course, a thousand things I've failed to discuss here. Administration, for instance. I also have not shown what exactly it is that's different about my imagined society and our current one: the differences are subtle and difficult to express (I'm working on it!): but you might be able to see bits and pieces of it so far. What I've done, after all, is dissect the essential processes of society and held them up for examination, at every level I'm aware of: and while they are lacking, they are not wrong. They were evolved organically as humanity required, and they have acted sufficiently; we are still here, are we not?
But there. That's a little taste. ^_^