Precision of Language:
When levity is removed from the conversation and other people are prohibited from finding it in difficult topics conflict, bloody conflict will follow. Do you know when things get really serious? You when all debate left the room? When it was decided as a whole (or perhaps by a couple of people, the loudest in the room perhaps) that there was no further debate on the matter? Was there a place for comedy in that room? Perhaps a joke would have broken the tension about five minutes before they decided to shoot the abdicated Russian Czar, his wife, and their five children in a smoke-filled basement under intoxicated madness. And it was reported that it took an inordinate amount of time to kill all of the Romanovs, particularly the children, due to the killer’s drunkenness and the viciousness of how it was done, and that’s the Russian Revolution.
Who do you think the first victims were of Soviet purges in the nascent years of the USSR? Socialists. Communists. Most of Ukraine, definitely the farmers. People can come up with really good ideas. Really good ideas that work well in their life. But the outcome is tied to the subject and not the other way around. And that is why that particular set of outcomes or steps hitherto cannot be franchised to another. And a person cannot change the world. Hell, she can’t change the person in front of her. In order to change 500,000 people, there must always be people who die. The heads of those who would not be swayed otherwise will always fall under the guise of “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
Even if I am 100% wrong about everything else my refusal to submit to the prevailing narrative proves to you that I am right about one thing. Some people simply do not care what you think and will not change their minds about something if they believe it strongly enough, and that is messy the reality when ideas are generalized for the masses. And the only way you can stop those people is through coercion and force. Every law is enforced at the day’s end by the business end of a gun.
And what is it that always precipitates war? The breakdown of diplomacy. And those are just big geopolitical words for what happens in conversion every day when someone gets triggered and you can never move past the trigger. It’s personal to you. Forcing other people to capitulate to your personal triggers for all of your days if you see fit IS the breakdown of diplomacy and is authoritarian by nature. Because what happens if I don’t? Take the feelings out of it. SOMEONE feels that way.
What word, memory, or physical trauma - where people were maimed and killed - is worth killing people; children, dissenters, your neighbor, over something that happened in the past? It is okay to be wrong. It is okay to say dumb stuff. Should you be shot for saying dumb stuff? Should you be shot for openly being dumb in the presence of people insecure with the outward perception of their own stupidity? Is this why the unchecked leader, in an effort to coddle and hide his own insecurities, enforces censorship, executes subversion, and orders physical violence to others? We all want to be free. Free from bondage. And more than anything, free to make mistakes.
Who is the minister of truth? To that I say no two people have the same morals. Who is the decider of who is dumb? Who writes the litmus test for supreme intellegence? I do pretty dumb stuff sometimes, oftentimes, and in a predictable way to the people around me. For example, I often wix up my mords. I’ll substitute the wrong word in a sentence such as “Will you please grab my brown shoes?” when I really wanted the green ones. Then one my son or my wife graciously brings the brown shoes I’ll be confused and ask why they didn’t grab the right ones. Then I’ll argue for a minute that I never said “brown.” And once more, I’ll tell or pick up a story without ever providing needed context - often from a dead silence - and then proceed get frustrated with the people around me until I am reminded that “Not everyone is in your head, Chad.” And the one that gets me in trouble as much as it brings people to the fire is that I talk too much and I sometimes don’t know when to yeild the floor.
When I stayed on the farm of Stephen Jenkinson in rural Ottawa, a group of other apprentiship participants and I were turning chicken and goat maneur which would be spread to the gardens for the next growing season. I was working alongside this young man who, like myself, had come alone in search of something. Little did he know, I was in search of someone to hear me talk that day. Something Steve said the night before had made me feel ways about things and I thought I had found a captivated audience to espouse what I had come up with. The conversation started just as that, a dialogue, but after a short time I had commanded the conversation with all the noises that were coming out of my mouth. And when the young man had exhausted his patience and his brain capacity with me, he announced (kindly enough) to the group that he needed a break. “Man, if you need a break, go take it. We’ve been working hard,” I said, feeling like I was helping him out by normalizing his apparent weariness. Sometimes you just don’t get the point, do you? One of the women who lived on the farm, supervising our activities, asked him if he needed a break from the work, or from the words. That one hit its mark.
When do those illogical thinking patterns become subversive? When do those illogical thinking patterns become subverted? How again do you subvert the true believers? And what are the consequences for the moral “victors?”
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.Exerpt from The Tao Te Ching Chapter 31 (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Sometimes things are visited upon you where there is no other choice but to act in self-defense, controlling someone through physical force. And there are never any winners in that, are there? Who is the winner in a home invasion when someone gets shot? The insurance company, and no one else. Because even if they have to pay out, their number crunchers in the accounting department have reasoned that their statistical analysis of life and death still yields them the best overall profits. Every time we hurt someone we tear at the fabric of humanity. That is why those who truly act in self-defense will do so only under those dire circumstances. They do so with the knowledge that they rip apart at that which makes us human.
We get so tied up in our precision of language and our cultivation of these words in our roladex that we use them to work backward from our conclusions. Those words come out on their own when they’re innervated naturally by the trust that comes with not having to over-explain yourself to the other person. And if you enter into any engagement as if it were a conflict or a competition that has winners and losers then you missed the point that comes from the breakdown of communication.
What always follows on a geopolitical level when diplomacy fails? The military. Diplomacy is failing every time we refuse to have a conversation about difficult topics. Every time we allow semantics, personal stuff, society, and our big words that we hide behind to infiltrate and consume the conversation, we will never get past the semantic argument over who has the best precision of language. Words convey meaning. That’s what they point to. The meaning that is conveyed by the experience, articulated into words.
There will always be people who don’t give a fuck about your feelings. And it shows in the way that the interaction unfolds. But the ones who execute grace in their delivery do so loving you - the person - more than your feelings, which are reactions to emotional visitations and perturbations. And if we cannot get past the semantic argument of how we feel about the words, we close off communication before we can sit with one another to find the nuance behind those words.
As a society, Americans are being told that we should take everyone at 100% face value and to question that is to undermine their entire being, not to look for the nuance and flesh out where that thought came from. We’re so afraid of linking connections with people that we don’t completely align with. And if we’re so consumed by words that don’t mean anything and simply point to something else, how can we color ourselves surprised when communication does indeed break down on the individual and at the societal level, further dividing people who all seem to face the same existential crisises?
And I don’t think that’s neurotic. The inability to find the nuance prohibits our ability to separate the ones who were ready to kill the czar and the ones who were joking about how ridiculous it would be to murder children and a wife and a husband and people for god sake people who were given a illogical narrative. They were told they were special and with that imbued uniqueness it was their responsibility, nay their decree from on High to go forth and to do good for their people. Imagine having that narrative fed to you your entire life under the recognition and observation of everybody else messing up, but being told that you are incapable of that and your message came straight from God. And maybe that little bit of nuance regardless of the way you feel about it with all your personal stuff can wrap your head around the fact that not everybody thinks that way and some people don’t give a fuck, and some people would be really willing to kill you because they feel you won’t let them speak freely and openly and have that affability to accept somebody where they are and not for who they think they are
today.