Politics & Social Issues : Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: The Good

The above mentioned really long title by the mid-nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard I became somewhat obsessed by a decade of so ago, has a passage that came into my mind as something I might build a rational response around, after my last kind of crazy-headed post was reacted to.  This is a longish post and might not be for everybody, but I spent some time, and think its fairly coherent, and certainly more by way of constructive thought than the last.

I’ve had time since my Pop-eyed, somewhat typically over the top response to two individuals I became far too narrowly focused on, to think about things more objectively.  That reaction had its own red center which can only replicate and perpetuate a disease, in directly identifying two individuals, so that the glare of a negative spotlight might be on them in a public forum.  I counterattacked in a cold, hyperbolic way I’d already had stored from previous experience and as if these two had committed spiritual murder, which was hardly the case.  They had only committed thoughtless stupidity; and then I did the same, and it's just fine if they don't acknowledge it.  But counterattacks just suck too in the way they merely replicate and strengthen the way the quicksand the problem’s made from sucks everyone down.
I was glad that Avery-doll put a think before you leap lock-down on my thread, and also strongly identified the problem I had just become a part of as one that has existed a long time, and sucks, and needs to go.  At the time I was clearly reacting through a red mist, deep down in my armory from being called boring out loud a fiftieth or so time straight, looking only for weapons.
 

To have learned from so many responses that this goes on frequently is hardly encouraging, but one of the things that was encouraging, to me, was to hear from so many people that they have experienced the same kind of disheartening, unprovoked, assault-based crap and want it fucking gone.  But as Strange Photon’s thread, which I was also grateful for and especially that it rendered responding to my thing moot, it’s no simple issue.  It’s particularly complex in the debate-based forums, which by their nature are more spontaneous and aggressive, in that they posit and counter different positions on various issues people have their own strong and differing opinions about.

Fortunately though, as long as their good hearts are pumping red blood at the time rather than green, along the dialectic from imbeciles to geniuses the difference between kindness and generosity, and mean-spirited miserable assault in critique, are hardly complex. And thank God for emotions and that they are at least in an increasingly tricky world, if anyone would like toi think about it pretty damn simple to discern. Just add context, read what’s said carefully, and maybe more than once, shake well, and there’s the answer that was there in the first place.  For instance, I know I can be a windy boring bastard once I go down into subjective self-absorption on an idea.

So in the fall, when I first about the process of my life's very first consensus skewering printed out in clear black and white; it was also clear from a beautiful invitation in that thread and in not too many but certain, so valuable posts subsequently, that this place as Sean mentioned and Buffy's reinforced, is primarily good.  So, I can play possum/passive when I don't know my ass from y elbow about a brand new situation I'm in, and though I am undoubtedly a windbag of sorts I’m hardly tone deaf.

So though it was few and far between I could recognize warmth and effort and invitation toward making me a better writer all over the place. There were things like outright admiration of my "glorious style," and like my first pee-wee hockey goal, after my first post that wasn’t like War&Peace made ten miles longer, from someone who had made the effort to point out the many repetitions I might have eliminated in an effort to make it only three miles longer.  And then there were some truly funny jokes with that same context all over them that were clearly invitational.  But what was invitational about that last post that made mention of my "astonishing style?"  I'm wondering because I like to waste time that way, and if anyone can fill me in please do.

Because of course I have an imbecile inside of me anyone realtive to eternity has who is mute and made out of blood, and feels a context when he sees it, and so after the previous hailstorm I recall mentioning, I guess rather unfortunately, that this particular joke-barrage gave me a “Sally Field” moment at the Oscars.  Because I knew the context, and who knows ten seconds from now the last time I checked I had a heart that could count, A,B,fucking C.
 

Ah, but we all know this, too, don't we?  There is this small core that actually somehow enjoy stirring the negative pot, and that can’t be reasoned with.  They seem to somehow remain unawares, that what they are liking at the time is the stepping upon of a neck or two, as if these are rungs up the ladder to their inevitable success.  I like to believe, many of these ones are blind to themselves; they’re likely to say things about how harsh and fresh out of new ideas this flyspeck of a world is, and this and that about how if you can’t stand the heat get out of the carnivorous kitchen when they likely have not even the first little clue what heat is, that is unless its some trumped up bullshit they're entertaining their narcissism with.  So in then right down narcissus avenue and the etcetera of complete bullshit, down the consistently polemic railroad.  The only thing more disheartening are ones are not blind to themselves, but in either case the thing is either kind cannot be reasoned with. 

In that case the main difficulty seems to me to be a question: how can they be effectively policed? 
This quote I’m going to include here, struck me as beautifully relevant in terms of this question.  It points to how anyplace a dysfunctional ethos becomes a too frequently occurring or entrenched norm dominated by those who cannot or will not recognize a thing between good-hearted criticism and stupid, nasty attack, then who can possibly tell anymore what is and isn’t an arrest-worthy crime? 
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“And yet one hardly dares say anything to one of these busy ones, for however rushed he may otherwise be, yet upon occasion he has time for a multitude of excuses by the use of which he becomes worse than he was before: excuses whose wisdom is about the same as when a sailor believes it is the sea, not the ship, that is moving.
One hardly dares say this to the intrepid one, for however rushed he otherwise may be, yet upon occasion when in the company of congenial spirits, he has ample time: to rob the unripe fruit of ridicule of its wisdom,” in order to poke fun at the speaker as one of life’s incompetents, as a man whom the busy one in his cleverness ignores – from the exalted viewpoint of his excuses.  Then, too, the general approval is everywhere upon the side of the busy one – everywhere, in the ever-increasing sum of the pressure of busyness, and in the swarming mass of excuses.  For with each one who is attacked there is always just one more excuse for the next person.  And while a person cannot, as a rule, prevent a sickness from becoming more and more dangerous, more and more malignant, the more it attacks those around him, yet with excuses it is just the reverse.  There the sickness seems to become milder and milder, the condition becomes more and more agreeable, the more persons there are attacked by it.  And if we all agree that the wretched, stunted state of these excuses, is the highest of all, then there is no one to say anything to the contrary.  Hence once again with virulent spiritual ailments it is even worse than with a physical disease, for no one dies of a disease simply because others have died of it.”
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Not to go overly Christian about it, but how on earth could any defender and even if she had her own 666 member police force adept in ferreting out all devilish destructive thoughts, or any one else with the possible exception of God Almighty, possibly police every thread for things that I’m assuming have long been established norms?  Where subtle assaults, counter-assaults, and more infrequently crude-insult loaded debates like extended pissing matches with no possible intersection have begun achieving any degree of dominance, (especially where clever, slippery words and the laughs are all around, so that except for the objectified bodies obtained it can seem like a party) in a debate/critique-based venue the spiritual CIA would be required to distinguish criminals from saints. 
These things all pass by at high speed and usually (except by their objects) unseen, unfelt, and then meld quickly into the next edition, which itself would need to be deciphered and pass through whatever Kangaroo court of its own, in order to have hell’s first chance at being properly interpreted.  And even were it possible for a defender and her staff and an additional legion of shadow detectives from on high in the Lit Reactor, to keep up with the incidences, then that just covers enforcement.   Lawyers and judges would then be required, since words, everyone’s separate side of the story, and so on and so on and they told two friends, are such nebulous bastards and bitches to decipher the reality of, in each separate context.
     Nope, can’t be done.  The one way it changes is if every participator in threads realizes as an individual, the need to be that much more vigilant there so that the rules that guide critiquing others respectfully don’t vanish anymore, which occasionally permits a thrashing and some kind of weird-ass version of “life in the food chain” taking over.
      So, anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about and I’m happy to drop the subject, and get into the workshop where I’ve spent too little time.  Rx, Flybywrite