Monday, January 20, 2020
4:15 a.m. Typing up yesterday’s truncated conversation just now, I am reminded that you and I had this conversation about multiple overlapping pecking-orders long ago, or perhaps it was before I recognized that not everything I thought was me thinking.
It does not matter per se, but in fact it was you ruminating over something you had read, and yes, years ago. Since you are not the same now, spelling it out will perhaps give you a different look at this same thought.
Seeing it from a different vantage-point, you mean. All right. I seem to remember it was in the context of multiple versus any one singular measurement of success. The idea was that if there was only one measurement, most people would necessarily be relative failures, for how many people can be at the top or near the top of any given pyramid? But if people’s lives contain many possible ways to measure, many more yardsticks exist, and many more opportunities.
That’s phrased badly. What I mean is that if everybody is measured by the same criterion, most will obviously not excel. But if everyone can choose his or her own criterion, and can excel at that, satisfaction is much more widespread.
Concrete examples, perhaps.
Regardless how he makes a living, regardless his economic or social status, someone may value his prowess as a hunter or fisherman, perhaps. Or may have an absorbing hobby. Or may value his family ties. Or may identify with ancestral glories, or with his church, or his political party, or his fraternal organization. Someone looking at that may think it is merely delusion or self-delusion, compared to “the thing that matters” (usually, economic or political), but in actual fact, these non-economic, non-political attachments may be far less abstract, far less theoretical, therefore more real. Only, social theorists may miss it entirely.
You won’t like the example much, but many people identify with their geographical region by way of sports teams. “We’re number one” is a way of saying (unconsciously, therefore unanswerably) “I am a part of the peak of the pyramid.”
You’re right, I don’t like it much. I dislike herd-mentality activities.
Which is funny, given what you are doing right now!
I haven’t ever thought of this very solitary activity as part of a herd-mentality.
No, you haven’t. We are smiling, though, because what else is it?
It is I myself communicating with whatever I communicate with. Are you calling yourself a herd?
We are reminding you that no one is as individual, as disconnected, as solitary, as you sometimes think of yourself!
In the sense of, “Look under the stone and I am there”?
Well – this could become a long disquisition. In the sense that you are by nature not an individual except, so to speak by courtesy, or as short-hand. In the sense that we are no more isolated than you are. In the sense that anyone thinking or being receptive to thought is by definition (practically) extending beyond himself to what resonates – that is, what corresponds.
But let’s return to the point being made. Different pyramids allow a society more stability, in that everyone can be a winner in his own mind – and this is not illusory but in fact is plain sense.
Marxists would see it as illusory, I imagine.
Certainly. Anyone wedded to one form of pecking-order as the only one that counts will see all others as illusory, and often as deliberately deceptive.
Aren’t they, often enough?
What people do and what they think they do is not always the same. What people do and why they do it is not always the same. The people who deliberately ensnare their fellows are still acting in ways they themselves don’t suspect, for ends they don’t suspect.
It occurs to me, we ought to say explicitly that in saying a different level of control, beyond the level of left and right arms, for instance, you were not referring to 3D conspiracies, though such conspiracies may exist.
No. We meant, a higher order of organization than 3D-only.
In other words, our 3D drama has non-3D scripting or at least plotting.
We will say it again and again until it sinks in automatically in every context: As above, so below. All is one.
Meaning, there is no “isolation” things can be seen in.
Seeing things in isolation helps see them at all. But at some point you always need to remember, everything connects. There are no absolute boundaries. So no, of course there can be no 3D drama without extension into non-3D. And, more than that, just because you experience at a 3D level doesn’t mean that the 3D level is the proper level to judge from. Your external world exists; you know that automatically. It exists in relation to you; you know that when you learn it. But this means that no two people experience the 3D “external” world in just the same way.
Let’s pause here.
Till next time, then.