Outside Influence

Note: This will not be a good blog post. It will not be a good blog post because I have ruminated for too long on how to approach this topic.If too many cooks can spoil the broth then too many opposing incomplete thoughts can ruin the essay. When I first attempted to write on the topic of Influence, I tried to make sweeping generalizations about humans en masse, to reveal (in my trademark fashion) that everyone at their core can be separated into one of three generic boxes regardless of the subject. While I do not want to discount the possibility of the above being true for this topic, I have found it too laborious to narrow down and interpret (read: pre digest) all of themes that I want to touch on. I have decided then to take the cowards way out and instead write about my own experience and hope that some of what I say  rings true for you too dear reader.

For the sake of this discussion I submit to you that I am an average person with a slightly elevated level of awareness. I possess the rare ability to observe and understand my average thoughts and express them intellectually as though they are intuitive or profound. Because of this I have decided that as far as average people are concerned the path by which I have been influenced in my life should loosely resemble the path of other average people.

The big question I am driving at is: "Where do outside influences come from?" While parents, siblings and friends help form the skeleton of who we are, we eventually evolve into our own distinct selves and in doing so we develop our own likes and dislikes that heavily alter our individual values and personalities. Also, I can't discount mentioning our Gaia given abilities where influence is concerned. Question: What came first the robot or the socially inept guy with a penchant for mathematics and engineering? It is rare to be opposed to exploiting our innate abilities to derive pleasure, self worth or meaning. While I realize that many of our influences are intertwined with our abilities, I also realize that many of them are not, as such, I'd like to explore those.

To begin, where did my outside influences even come from? I fancy myself a man of great artistic taste yet a simple glance of my music, movie and book collection will reveal this claim to be counterfeit. If  asked, I could produce a small list of credible artists to cite as my influences but that wouldn't be the whole story. You see, for every five minutes I spend sourcing out provocative, inspiring material I waste the rest of that hour trolling the internet and other outlets for mindless, repetitive garbage.

To add fuel to this pathetic admission, I no longer have to source out information that I am interested in because I have either purchased it, bookmarked it or added it to my Netflix Queue. If I am being generous, I might spend about 5 minutes per day attempting to have a useful thought. Even where Netflix is concerned I don't delve too deeply. I don't hit the search tab, I don't probe for a gritty independent documentary about a worldwide problem explained through the microcosm of tuna fishing. Netflix tells me what I want to see and although I rarely agree with its automated selections, I eventually find something to watch dispassionately for a half hour or so.

I claim to have an open mind but I stay away from untested food, unvetted friends, unknown places....things. While  I have the capacity to hear and understand an alternative point of view... I don't want to. On a subconscious level I've already decided. I can change my mind temporarily, in front of an audience, in the face of glaring evidence that contrasts my perspective, but I won't do it for long. In my quiet moments I will mull over the information in my head and slowly retreat to my original thought on the matter.  In fact, if there is anything that supersedes my apathy toward incoming influence, it's the act of fortifying my walls of ignorance.  I will google for hours on end clicking through 46 pages of results scanning for a definition or quote that justifies my existing stance so I don't have to change one iota of how I think.

When people outright recommend things to me, I run from them. When close friends or relatives hand pick and deliver things to me that they think I'd like, I run even farther. What makes this all a little scary then is the realization that most of my outside influences probably come from the internet...and not just the internet but the lazy spoon fed part that predigests ideas for me.The internet, a place that is as loud as it is vast, that distracts more than it illuminates. An exacerbation of racism, sexism and stupidity, eradicator of the moral and ethical codes that we are forced to uphold in civilized society.

Yet, this in itself is not the real danger. The world is full of freaks, nutters, rapists, murders, anarchists....Taylor Swift fans. No one person (self included) who is moderately grounded is going to commit heinous acts against people because of a vague reference on the internet.  Good and bad have always been defined, the only fight has been over middle ground, middle ground which I fear is being distorted by people like me.

The Facebookers, The Twitterers, The Redditors, The Pinterestors, The Instagrammers etc are passively affecting the things that I vaguely, in a roundabout way, don't mind addressing in 5 minute snippets or 140 character of snark. My non existent attention span requires constant stimulus from id based outlets. I don't have time to process information, I just want to click on the thing and have that thing make perfect sense all at once.  Thankfully, I rarely have to choose what I consider valuable because any website worth its salt has a ranking system to push the most popular, and by association the most valuable articles to the top. To keep things fair, rankings are based on user votes and if I so choose, I can be a voter and help influence the path of popularity.

Have I mentioned what a burden voting is? I mean, I know what I like and what I hate but I don't know what I sorta like and what I sorta hate.  This puts me in an uncomfortable situation because every Facebook post forces me to make a decision. Underneath each post hovers the "like" button. If someone on my friends list posts a Ghostbusters quote it's a no brainer insta-like. However, if one of my friends posts a sciency article that I find vaguely interesting I won't necessarily "like it" even though I don't necessarily dislike it. Yet, what I communicate indirectly through my passivity is: "Your sciency article sucks and no one loves you."

In addition to this, many sites have added a dislike button which give me the power to bury and destroy internet postings, which has revealed to me a strange phenomenon. More often than not I am drawn out of my voting apathy to downvote something that has already been poorly received. A negative reaction to something I otherwise would have had no opinion on is produced simply from others dislking it before I saw it. Conversely, sometimes I will view an article and notice that it is on the precipice of voter death and I think to myself "Well, this level of criticism seems overt." and I find myself upvoting/liking something that I otherwise wouldn't have liked. I seem to be participating exclusively in a world that I have absolutely no interest in, yet my boredom and requirement for stimulus entice me to repeatedly feed back into it. 

But what's the alternative, do my own research on my individual interests and link them on my Twitter feed? Write long winded blowhardy posts that subtly instruct people how to live without directly stating it, all the while being ignored? And if I'm not ignored then my opinions that I've compiled and delivered as a reaction to the stranglehold of popular culture "hive thinking", the only responses I will receive will be from like minded individuals whose strongest desire is to fortify their own walls of ignorance...that seems about right.

I do remember being influenced though in the distant past. A mistake of age is the delusion that "everything was better back then." Back then was better because I wasn't dead inside. Back then was better because I still had hope. Back then I wasn't so desperate, scared, lonely and surrounded by death. Back then I had a force field from reality, back then I was insulated, back then I didn't have to deal with it, back then I made mistakes before they became choices. 

Back then music and movies still meant something, they activated my wonder and creative ambition. I idolized those creative folks, they were giants, they had answers, they held the truth. But then they got old....I got old too.  I grew into their world like a frayed sweater and began to see what they saw...in some cases I saw more. As my heroes aged they began to falter, the sought out greed and comprised their ideals....they became people and revealed themselves to be fools.  All through my formative years I was building a personality that was in large part in line with who I thought my heroes were...but they weren't. Now here I am, a person changed but adrift without answers. 

But seriously, I gotta go, the Friends cast just reunited on Jimmy Kimmel and I absolutely need to watch that video clip.

Spiritual Theft

In version 1.0 of this blog before it was viciously deleted by  a trigger happy spambot killer I concocted an essay that claimed that Atheists were ugly. The argument followed the same line of thinking as the thought that educated people are generally less attractive than uneducated people. Education, personality and the cultivation of skills are tools that have been used for hundreds of years by "less than beautiful" people in order to be considered desirable mating material. My original thought was that people who arrive at a spiritual place that is contrary to the norm, who are not born into it by default, do so as a result of great struggle. Attractive people do not have great struggles in their lives because...they are attractive and the rest of us willfully give to them in abundance just for the opportunity to be near.  It follows then that people who have adopted an alternative thought system have done so as an act of compensation, and those who compensate do so because they have to.

As you can imagine, the essay was well received (NOT!) but what was surprising to me was who was offended by the essay and why. The overwhelming majority of static that I received for my indirect compliment of Atheists was from Atheists themselves.  It turns out I had grossly misjudged the overall construction of what constitutes a modern Atheist, specifically the default adolescent Atheist who was "born into the faith."  The responses that I received were supremely superficial never engaging with my main points and instead rested on the sting of powerful counter arguments like "Fuck you" and "Ricky Gervais isn't that ugly." While I'll admit that calling an entire group of people ugly is a bit brash I expected at at the very least a few pretentious well thought out retorts from individuals encouraging me to evolve.

Yet, after almost 300 replies not one utterance seemed even remotely intelligent or worth replying to. I had accredited a great deal of respect to Agnostics and Atheists because I felt in some way that they were shouldering the same confusion and fears about life and death that I was, but I was wrong. Sadly it seemed that these Atheists were as stupid if not stupider than the devoutly religious for whom they had made it their life's work to lambaste. Then it dawned on me that somewhere along the way the Atheist movement started to parallel the evolution of rock music. What started as a form of expression so powerful it couldn't be contained or explained through modern day motifs was interpreted and shrunk into a device to indirectly tell your parents to fuck off. In other words, the thrust and importance of the movement lost all of its meaning once it became an accessory to, rather than the foundation of, ones entire existence.  It was because of this thought that I started to believe that that the great majority of Theists/Atheists are guilty of spiritual theft.

The best way I can think of introducing the idea of Spiritual theft is this: Imagine that you and and some guy from 200 years ago want a hamburger. In order for the guy from 200 years ago to eat a hamburger he must first invent the hamburger. After that he must go out, find a cow, slaughter it, chop it into pieces, ground it up, harvest some wheat, (revealing ignorance) then do the next steps of turning wheat into bread, grow some vegetables, cut them up, cut down a tree, get a fire going, cook it up and eat it. For you to get a burger you have to get in your car, drive three miles, yell at someone through a speaker, wait two minutes, eat the hamburger. Both chain of events result in hamburgers being eaten but one is a more complex all consuming process. It wouldn't be fair to say that just because the two of you arrived at the same outcome that you have had the same experience.

Atheism is not a belief, it is a lack of belief. This lack of belief does not manifest because an Atheist is missing something inside of them, rather it is a realization that something is missing absolutely and wondering why. If the Atheist is not pondering then they have subscribed to a belief, a belief that makes them whole and stops them from thinking.  Faith is a belief in something without proof. This notion is acceptable in and of itself, the problem arises when people of faith attempt to moralize as if their faith is fact, which it isn't. If faith could be supported with irrefutable evidence then faith would cease to exist because it would be replaced with fact. Those of us who are handed Atheism are just as guilty as those of us who are handed Religion because it churns out the same dogmatic "I am right, you are wrong, my voice is louder than your voice" creeps.

When we were young we trusted our parents with making all of our big decisions for us, we relied on them in order to survive and thrive. But then we grew up into our adult selves and we moved away. Maybe your parents got divorced and perhaps you asked yourself "Did I every really love them?" or "Did I really know them/ did they really know me at all?" Conversely they may be thinking "Where did I go tragically wrong in raising this idiot kid?" or "I can't believed I spawned a pathetic little shit asshole." When we are young we confuse comfort and security with love and we don't really understand what is what until we test and scrutinize the details.

If you haven't tested it, then you haven't invested in it. The faction of Agnosticism/Atheism that I ascribe to does not reject Religion so that I can delve into my deviant desires without fear of judgement. My thoughts and feelings about existence don't give me the warm fuzzies or any sense of solace. For all intents and purposes, I welcome the love, I welcome the happy ending.  I want to be nestled in the bosom of the universe and hugged for all eternity. Unfortunately, I do not have proof to tip the scale in that direction, therefore I am left with only what I can prove.

The same goes for the religious among us. If you believe because you have always believed, then you have never really believed. You were born into a house that you never left and until you do, your free will is just an illusion. Born again believers en masse have the most transparent agenda of all.  In an attempt to atone for their life of crime or sexual transgressions they double down on kissing God's ass in the vain hope that he will reconsider.  It is my opinion for real faith to exist that it must be tested and cultivated through suffering and sacrifice without guarantee of reward. Any belief system that is weighted in reward destroys the altruistic desire to be good for goodness sake.

Another growing misconception is that belief/philosophy is a team sport. Like the hysteria created when a collection of athletes from different towns get paid millions of dollars to wear jerseys with the letters of cities within 60 miles of the rural pastures from which we were spawned, the process of belief has begun to resemble a franchise mentality. "Yer either fur us or again us!" no questions asked, no explanations desired. The less complex among our human ranks have rendered mans search for meaning down to a simple two party conflict. We are all given hats, foam fingers and rally towels with the expectation that we will scream in delight for the home team and boo/hiss if we see a flash of the visiting teams colors. We claim that the reason we have so much contempt for the opposing team is because they are misguided, uninformed and soulless.  We'll claim that our harsh judgement is rooted in the great sense of sadness and loss that we feel at the realization that a population of people are throwing away their lives. Yet, we are rigid and we refuse compromise, to do so would blaspheme the foundation on which our beliefs have been constructed. Instead we choose ridicule because as you know, there is no better way to persuade others to conform to your way of thinking than through verbal abuse. (Not!)

The most important thing that you'll ever think or believe shouldn't be handed to you based on your geography or the running trend in your familial line. Faith or the lack of it should not be a passive pursuit that you sign on to early on in life without continued evaluation. Salvation, transcendence or scientific supremacy cannot be bought, it must be earned. Further, don't poison the well of free thought with propaganda in order to convert people to your way of thinking. Just because you won the war and left an opposing army's city in ashes does not mean that you changed their minds. Their captured soldiers may elect to fight in your ranks but it is only the threat of maiming or death that binds them to your will. In order to change people's minds you must engage in honest, open conversation. Certainly you can hold the line and stick firmly to your values but at the same time you must truly be open to changing your opinion of yourself and all of existence. Only through communication and mutual respect can we ever hope to get to the nougaty center of how we truly feel and who we really might be.