Writer's Block

Writer's block isn't the absence of ideas. It's not a roadblock.

It's more like a maze standing between you and your goal.

You spend long, agonizing moments navigating through it, turning this way and back, looking for a clear path.

Sometimes you take long detours. You get sidetracked. You lose sight of the goal completely. You start asking yourself, Why the fuck am I in this maze anyway?

You think, I should just look for another goal, another message or topic that might be easier to write about. Save this one for later, you suggest.

Then you assess how much time you've lost wandering this maze.

You track your progress. You reread what you've written thus far, a bulky mess that totally veers away your intended topic.

It's a maze of your own creation. You know how to find the way back to your goal.

Clear, concise, simple.

Eye of the tiger.

Listen.

"Don't be a writer; be writing."

Know Thyself

Do you have a moment to talk about your lord and savior? Don't worry, I haven't converted. I'm not talking about Jesus Christ or any other religious figure.

I'm talking about you.

We've already discussed how your brain defines the reality you experience, how denying or ignoring certain negative aspects of yourself leads to misery, and how happiness resides within. If you're still following along, you'll notice that the above themes all have one thing in common: you.

If you're looking for salvation, look in the mirror. You hold the key to your own happiness, well-being, and success. Only you, not some mythological being or historical figure, can make your life a torturous hell or paradise of delights.

If I founded a new religion, "Know Thyself" might very well be the first commandment.

Objective reality exists. It's all around you. But what you experience is a subjective model of reality generated by your senses and brain. This model is unique unto you; it's colored by your past experiences, biases, and a slew of other factors. If you ignore the underlying factors that influence your model of reality, you lose the ability to experience objective reality as it truly is. 

In other words, you can never know anything accurately without first knowing yourself as you truly are.

Knowing yourself requires vigilance. You must constantly monitor thoughts as they enter your mind, assessing their value and accuracy. You must also seek out hidden biases, judgments, irrational beliefs, inconsistencies, and contradictions hiding in your psyche. The sole purpose of these is deception. They are impediments to enlightenment and must be yanked from your mind as one yanks weeds from a garden, so that they never take root again.
 
This constant self-questioning can be tiresome. It can also be painful. The ego is never completely dissolved. It always keeps a foothold in your psyche and will often pipe up, especially after you discover a fallacy that is central to your character. Uncovering nasty habits and long-held prejudices in yourself stings. You may feel disappointed, ashamed, or plain embarrassed. It's important to remember that every painful revelation is an opportunity for growth and self-improvement.

There is no shame in doing wrong unknowingly, only in leaving known wrongs untouched. Silence your ego, resolve to amend whatever thought or behavior caused you shame, and move on.

So, are you ready to meet the real you? Good. It's a bumpy road to enlightenment but if you open your mind and heart to the journey, you will learn things about yourself you never knew existed.

In order to understand the process by which one comes to know oneself accurately, we must discuss  two aspects or byproducts of the human psyche and how each one relates to the other. Here I will refer directly to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist and one-time partner to Sigmund Freud, whose work has had an immense influence on modern psychology.

The central thesis to Jungian psychology is the process of individuation, by which the two halves of human psyche--the conscious and subconscious mind--are integrated together while maintaining their relative autonomy. According to Jung, the conscious and subconscious minds speak entirely different languages. The conscious mind--the narrator in your head, the voice of your inner-deliberations--speaks in words while the subconscious--the storage shed where all the stuff that never made it to your conscious mind is kept--speaks via instincts and symbols.

This lack of communication between the two halves makes it difficult for you to explore the hidden catacombs of your psyche. The conscious mind is largely in your control but it is also subject to powerful influence from your subconscious. Your subconscious connects memories and emotions together, cementing biases and prejudices without the consent of your conscious mind. A traumatic event in your early childhood might dictate your thoughts and behavior long after the memory has been relegated to the vaults. This connection between an event and a set of emotions is difficult to sever.

Now your subconscious attempts to communicate with you in a variety of ways but its messages, spoken in an entirely foreign language, require some deciphering.

Jung, like Freud, spent a great deal of time analyzing the dreams of his patients over the course of his career. Unlike Freud, who thought dreams carried messages of hidden desires (often of a sexual nature), Jung believed that dreams were symbolic messages from the subconscious mind. He found that dream-symbols were archetypical, meaning that they appeared in much the same form in the dreams of all people regardless of age, genre, or culture. It was this discovery, along with the universal themes of far-flung myths and religions, that fueled Jung's theory of a collective unconscious shared by all humankind.

Dreams are not the only means by which you can come to know your hidden self. Bits and pieces of your subconscious are constantly floating up to the surface by way of habits. Whether physical or mental, habits are automated programs that hide in your subconscious and affect your thoughts, speech, and actions at the surface level.  By turning a critical eye onto yourself, you can often discover underlying issues buried in your subconscious.

Habits of mind and body are formed through repetition. So if your friend is a notorious exaggerator and liar who constantly proclaims himself to be a paragon of truth, you can safely assume that he lacks knowledge of self. The way he envisions himself is at odds with his dishonest behavior, which was hammered into its present shape by constant repetition. This friend lies so much it has become a habit; meanwhile, his conscious mind recognizes that dishonesty is a bad quality and denies the behaviour.

How can such a person ever come to know others accurately? How can he ever know objective, unfiltered reality if the very means by which he explores and interacts with reality is skewed, twisted, or distorted?

"I look gooooooood"

If you wish to see yourself as you are, listen to your subconscious. Scrutinize your thoughts, words, and deeds constantly, taking care to eliminate inconsistencies, fallacies, biases, and prejudices regardless of their source. That is the only way to remove the veil from your eyes and see the universe for what it truly is.

As Jung puts it,

as long as [man] is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

Or as Nietzsche put it, "Where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way."

Know thyself.

Baby Steps

I've been following the so-called "Fair Elections Act" lately and I have yet to see a bill so unanimously and vehemently opposed by such a wide range of characters. The chief electoral officer of Canada did a particularly good job picking the proposed legislation apart, as did a group of international researchers  with no personal interest in our country's politics.

Not that anyone's opinion matters: the Tories are well-versed at ignoring expert testimony, especially of the scientific variety.

And while everyone is busy pointing out the various problems with the Fair Elections Act, that beady-eyed little rodent Pierre Poilievre insists it's a terrific piece of legislation.

A face only a mother could… actually, not even.

I don't know what it is about Poilievre. The mere sight of that smug, smarmy smile makes me want to punch him right in the nose. I know it's uncalled for. I don't care. We're all entitled to our irrational moments.

Reading about all that's wrong with the Fair Elections Act, one has to wonder which part of this monstrous omnibus bill Poilievre thinks is "terrific." Is it the fact that it makes it harder for people to vote? That it could hurt plans to increase voter turnout? Wait, I think I know. Is it because it muzzles Elections Canada, the organization tasked with ensuring that no funny business takes place come voting time?

I could paste link after link about all that is wrong with this piece of garbage--how it creates loopholes for campaign spending and party fundraising; how Stephen and his friends didn't bother consulting the leading expert on election law while crafting the bill; and how the Tories moved to shut down debate an hour after the bill was introduced--but I'm not going to. I like to cultivate positive thought and my heart's already racing from looking at that photo of Poilievre's face.

I CAN'T HEAR YOU

Instead of criticizing and mocking, I'd like to congratulate MP Kennedy Stewart whose e-petition bill passed by a vote of 142-140 on January 29th. Why is this worthy of congratulations? Let me summarize:

1. Stewart is a rookie MP
2. He's a member of the NDP, aka the opposition
3. The Conservatives, aka the majority government, opposed the bill
4. Several Tories decided to cross the party line and voted yes for the motion, causing it to pass

Typically when a motion put forth by the opposition lacks the support of the majority government--especially one that is notorious for whipping its members into voting along party lines--it is thoroughly squashed. And that's what would've happened to Stewart's e-petition bill if a few Tories hadn't broken rank and supported the motion.

You may also recall that I mentioned Kennedy's motion in one of my first posts where I claimed it was a step in the right direction. Here's an excerpt from Stewart's page:

Currently, only paper petitions can be accepted in the House of Commons. Online petitions receiving thousands of signatures from Canadians cannot be submitted and often go unanswered. I believe this system needs to be brought into the 21st century through electronic petitioning – as has already been done successfully in several provinces and numerous other countries.

My motion also proposes that short debates be triggered in Parliament in cases where a petition receives a significant number of signatures and is sponsored by at least five MPs. Not only would Canadians be able to easily express themselves by signing petitions online, their views and concerns could then be directly addressed by Members of Parliament.

And now to quote myself from 7 months ago: " I propose that we wrest control of our nation away from the crooked politicians before it is too late and that we drag this democracy of ours into the 21st century."

Maybe I was being a little dramatic with the "wresting control" part but I am totally serious about modernizing our political system. This ought to be our main priority! Imagine going to the corporate head office of some massively successful transnational company and finding that the receptionist is using an IBM 610.

Let me find you in our system, sir. Should only take 4 hours.

Our political system is the equivalent of an IBM 610. It's old as shit and needs to be massively upgraded.

Kennedy Stewart's e-petition bill may not be the complete overhaul we sorely need but then again no single bill can be. The process of modernizing out political system will have to be done one step at a time, and this bill is a worthy first step.

My man-crush on Stewart only got stronger after I heard about Bill C-558, Stewart's new project. Also from Stewart's page:

After years of muzzling, mismanagement, and misuse of science by the Conservative government, this new office will promote real transparency and ensure decisions made in Ottawa are based on the best available scientific evidence.

And me, again: "Transparency is the best weapon against corruption; eliminate all the hiding places and politicians will have no choice but to behave."

The part about making decisions based on the best available scientific evidence also pleases me a great deal. The government is supposed to represent and work for all Canadians equally regardless of personal belief, ethnicity, genre, culture, etc. How can it hope to do this if it makes decisions based on subjective beliefs held by some people and not others?

It's not to say that subjective opinion and belief shouldn't play a part in political discourse, only that they should be layered atop a foundation of objective facts. Ideally, here is how the decision-making process should take place (props to /u/ddkv on Reddit for breaking it down):

1. A policy is challenged or in need of modernization.
2. A group of experts is consulted on the options moving forward and their recommendation
3. The government acknowledges the expert opinion (the technocrat solution) and includes their broader view of social, political and legal concerns in making the decision
4. The decision is made, and if it runs counter to expert opinion, the over-riding reasons are clearly stated, and the experts are invited to give advice moving forward based on the decision made.
5. With any new advice from the experts based on the new direction, the policy is written.

Once again, Stewart's new bill doesn't eliminate belief-based decision-making but it's certainly another step in the right direction.

I'm glad that there's at least one person in parliament who appears to share my concern with the way our system is misfiring and breaking down at every turn. I don't expect anyone, least of all a rookie MP from Burnaby, to swoop in and fix all our problems; I'm just looking for baby steps in the right direction, and so far Stewart is the only guy laying those steps out.

Keep up the good work Kennedy, and congrats on the win.

Pitfalls of Duality

Our ancestors noted the difference between day and night, life and death, cold and heat, male and female, and probably assumed that all things, whether by nature or deity, were made in pairs.

It's no wonder we're susceptible to extremes. We've been thinking in terms of opposites, of this or that, for much of our existence. Our behavior is but a reflection of this effective but limited way of perceiving the world.

There's a good reason Frans de Waal calls us bipolar apes. We switch back and forth between kindness and prejudice, compassion and carelessness, generosity and greed, without ever noting our own internal inconsistencies.

The way we perceive reality in pairs manifests itself in our personal and public ideologies as well. Everything from nutrition and entertainment to spirituality and politics is subject to our extremist tendencies. Think about it. Low calories vs. low carbs. Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. Atheism vs. theism. Capitalism vs. socialism.

Take parenting, for example. 

Your task as a parent is monumental. Nature provides the raw material, a unique compilation of physical and psychological traits passed down from generations past, which parents must shape, mould, and arrange into a balanced, functional person.

Despite what many parents and parenting books claim, there is no right or wrong way to raise a child. Everyone is unique. What works for you may not work for another.It's your job to figure out how best to instill in your child the skills, values, and behavior you believe are most important.

A rigid, dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach to parenting stifles your child's individuality. You cannot hope to raise a balanced, well-adjusted child by employing an extremist method.

In my experience, extremist parents fall into one of two categories: authoritarian or egalitarian.

The authoritarian parent believes that children should respect parental authority unquestioningly and without exception. She refuses to reason with a disobedient child and believes that bartering or negotiating is a sign of weakness soon to be exploited. The authoritarian parent may also believe that physical punishment is an acceptable or even natural part of parenting. She may proclaim that she was spanked as a child and turned out fine, though such a statement always makes me shudder. I've heard too many irrational, dysfunctional, and ignorant people claim that they "turned out fine" to take it seriously.

But I digress.

The egalitarian parent believes that children and parents stand on equal footing. He believes in a hands-off approach to parenting, allowing his child the freedom to figure things out on her own. Even when the child is misbehaving the egalitarian parent abstains from resorting to discipline and strives to keep his child happy at all costs. If supper isn't to the child's liking he will prepare some alternative. If a gift doesn't meet the child's standards, he will exchange it for something else.

If humans are bipolar apes, capable simultaneously of noble and savage deeds, it stands to reason that the ideologies we produce, whether religious, political, behavioral, or personal, reflect our bipolar nature. For this reason I regard all ideologies as mirrors: if we study them carefully, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in their pages. And just as one would expect, this glimpse reveals nobility and wisdom shoulder to shoulder with savagery and ignorance.

Extremist ideologies rarely provide a functional solution to the problems we face; in fact, they create more problems than they solve. They overemphasize one aspect of the issue while completely ignoring (or worse, slandering) another equally important aspect.

Extremist ideologies are divisive. They reinforce illusory distinctions and blind people to reality. They only represent a select few, never the greater good, and as a result are doomed to fail.

Think of the child who learns to obey his authoritarian parents unquestioningly. How will he fair when faced with authority figures who, unlike his parents, may not have his best interests in mind? How will the child learn to understand and employ reason or to question dubious information, regardless of its source? Much of our adult lives are spent compromising, negotiating, coaxing; if the child learns only that he must do what he is told, how will he react when others do not follow his orders?

The child who never experiences discipline finds herself in a different but no less harmful predicament. Made the center of the universe by her parents, she will never learn to consider others, to think of the consequences of her actions, or to cope with rejection, adversity, or tragedy. She will come to expect from others what her parents provided: everything she wants, immediately. Dangerously self-centered and short-sighted, the child of egalitarian parents is woefully unprepared for the realities of adult life.

It is clear to me that extremes are necessary if only in order to tell the full story. Each model contributes important principles and ideas to the whole; by subscribing to one and ignoring/hating the other, we miss out on an important piece of the puzzle.

Reason with your child calmly; explain things in terms she will understand, drawing comparisons to things she is familiar with; allow the child to explain her side of things; reach an agreement and explain to your child what has just taken place and why.

If this fails--if the child refuses to listen, ignores your attempts to reason, is rude, belligerent, or throws himself to the ground in a fit--it is time to teach the child an important lesson about cause and effect. Discipline the child in accordance to the severity of his misbehavior; when the child is calm, explain why you have resorted to punishment; remind the child that you attempted to solve the issue amicably but that, due to his actions, you had no choice but to dole out punishment.

By blending elements from the egalitarian and authoritarian schools of thought, you solve most of the problems that come with one or the other. You get the best of both worlds, the full story, a balanced approach.

Don't hate.

Do not let yourself be fooled: no one religion, philosophy, or ideology has all the answers. Like the people who dreamed them up, ideologies are mixed bags of noble and savage ideas. It is your duty to sift through the rubbish-heap of human thought in search of the noble ideas--universal ideas that speak to us across the ages and make sense regardless of the era that birthed you--and employ them in your life.

Do this and you will never be mislead by your inner-bipolar ape again.

/rant over

Labels and Identity

Humans love to define things and arrange them into neat little boxes. We find comfort in knowing what a thing does, how it behaves, and where it belongs. When we encounter something new we try to cram it into an existing box and if no such box exists, we create a new one and keep filing away.

Pattern-recognition: the reason we see
faces everywhere

We can thank natural selection for our OCD tendencies. In prehistoric times the ability to recognize patterns and categorize information gave us a massive advantage over the competition. This advantage was further solidified by the development of language and writing. Recording and sharing information with others transformed us from hunter-gatherers to the social actors we are now.

Labels played a crucial part in the evolution of language. They allow us to package a large amount of data--predator, striped, growling, fast--into a small bundle--tiger--so that if you and I are out hunting together and I see a tiger, I don't have to explain in detail what a tiger is: I simply yell "tiger" and because we have a shared understanding of what this label means, we run like hell.

There's a trade-off though. In order to share information expediently we must be prepared to sacrifice a certain amount of detail. For this reason, labels work better with simple objects and ideas. When we apply labels to the complex, nuanced, or ambiguous, they tend to fall short. 

If you were asked to sum yourself up with a single label, what would it be? Would it accurately describe who you are? Of course not. You might be a parent, an artist, a liberal, a Muslim, a skeptic, or any other number of things. A single label could never do you justice.

We're too damn complicated to fit into those neat little boxes we love so much. You might label yourself a vegetarian but eat chicken and fish, label yourself a liberal but support capital punishment. A label may accurately describe parts of you and get other parts completely wrong.

Labels provide a sketch, not a photograph. They're meant to convey meaning with speed, not accuracy and detail.

We invented labels to define objects and ideas in our environment; sometimes they work great and some times they don't. But when we adopt labels wholesale, they begin to define us. We change to fit the labels we internalize, sometimes for better, but more often for worse.

Let me tell you about Tim. 

Tim was lost. Like many people he was looking for meaning in life. He had a decent jobs, friends, and hobbies, but he felt empty inside. "There has to be more to life than this," he often bemoaned. Determined to fill the void, he consulted the most popular book of answers ever written, the Bible.

At first the ancient book beguiled him. It contained fairy tales followed by the barbaric history of a single people claiming to be chosen by God. Tim couldn't understand why so many people resorted to this compilation of bronze-age stories for advice. He skipped ahead, reading a verse here and a verse there until at last he stumbled onto something beautiful. "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust."

Where the Old Testament confused Tim, Christ's messages of compassion, humility, and love spoke directly to him. He read most of the New Testament and sought the advice of a pastor. He attended a few services and was touched. Something struck a chord in his heart. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of love and acceptance, the unity of the congregation, or the feverish certainty of the pastor. Tim took this as a sign that he had finally found what he so desperately sought.

Tim got baptized.  

Now he begins to look at the Old Testament in a new light. He attempts to justify the atrocities and derive moral lessons from the cruelty of his deity. The story of Job becomes an illustration of virtue. When God stays Abraham's hand, Tim sees this as an act of mercy; yet who was it that commanded Abraham to slay his son in the first place?

Tim doesn't accept these new beliefs because they make sense. They are the luggage that comes with many Christian labels. Christ may have lured Tim toward his newfound faith but now he subscribes to ideas and beliefs that directly oppose the teachings of Christ.

Tim's label is changing him. His mind is now crowded with contradictory ideas, many of which entered his psyche via his new label. Somewhere behind closed doors he still possesses his pre-Christian beliefs about the universe. How does Tim reconcile the Big Bang and evolution with Genesis? "Love thy neighbour" with "their little ones [will be] dashed to death against the ground, their pregnant women ripped open by swords?" How will he react when someone points out the many inconsistencies in the Bible, or the many verses where God commands his people to perform horrible deeds?

These are the pitfalls of subscribing to a label indiscriminately.

This problem is not limited to religion. Political, cultural, and philosophical labels have the same effect. It doesn't even have to be something ideological. Whenever you form an emotional bond with something that transcends you, be it a hockey team, work of art, flag, culture, or television show, your perception of the thing becomes distorted. That's why diehard fans are willing to fight and even riot for their team, why people get into heated arguments about the merits of JRR Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, and why people support corrupt political regimes even when those regimes blatantly violate their rights. 

We want to believe that people are simple, that they are either capitalists or socialists, republicans or democrats, theists or atheists, but all of these labels are gross oversimplifications, not accurate representations. People transcend labels. 

You are not obligated to accept a label wholesale. You can break a label down idea by idea and take only the ones that work for you. Here's how you do it: measure each idea's benefit to your life and the effect it has on those around you; if the idea is beneficial to you, does not contradict your existing moral code, and harms no one, make it your own.

If on the other hand the idea fails in any of these regards, and even though it may be somehow connected to another idea you hold dearly, discard it without hesitation. 

/rant over