Black, white, grey in 3D

Monday, May 9, 2022

6:40 a.m. If you gentlemen have an agenda for the morning, let’s pursue it. Otherwise I have had a few thoughts, and I’m experienced enough with your ways to suspect influencing.

There is no ownership of ideas; there is no obligation to follow an impulse. But either may occasionally be profitable. If you want to talk about crime, we can. As usual, anything we address will branch off in some profitable direction, given time and integrity and perseverance.

Okay, then, setting for f, r, c, p.

[I am putting the next five grafs into Roman, as easier to read than italic.]

I was talking to my friend Louis the other day about various unprofitable things people pursue in life as if they were worth pursuing. I mentioned that as far as I could see, crooks stole money and were stolen from, no matter what they spent it on.

I just remembered, the discussion began with people he knows buying a grill – a barbeque grill, the kind of thing you cook hamburgers on – that had some fancy attachments that allowed it to be started (and controlled, I imagine) by internet. A grill, for $2500! Not $25, which might be a reasonable price for a grill without internet access, but 100 times that.

Is there any way, in any sane set of values, that a grill can be worth $2500?

As we talked, the idea generalized. It’s common knowledge that many people value things not so much by what they do, as by what they cost. Rolex watches, an example that comes to mind now (though not then). Can a watch do anything well enough or unique enough to be worth thousands of times what a cheap but accurate one does? The list of examples could be endlessly expanded, of course. We all could add examples from things we’ve seen.

No matter what level the crook – from Ponzi to the lowest used-car dealer or corner stick-up artist – what people do for money is not worth what they can use it for. That’s not quite right, but I won’t try to fix it. Over to you.

[Resuming italics for me, Roman for TGU.]

Your ideas have a common focus, but you don’t quite know what it is.

That’s true, both halves of it. I can feel it, but I can’t get it clear, and so I can’t express it.

So, you know our methods. Lay out some bullets.

Okay.

• Crime pays, and gets swindled in turn.
• People’s emptiness demands to be filled.
• If you don’t know what game you’re playing, it’s hard to keep score.

Seems to me there ought to be more, but perhaps this will get us started.

You forgot

• It gets harder to tell what’s wrong, when so much is wrong.

Oh yes! That’s a big one with me these days. When I was young, right and wrong seemed clear.

Let’s begin here, then. This is more the nub of it. It will tie in many things we have considered separately.

All right.

A child is usually born with a mentality that sees things as black and white, this or that, with no shades of grey. It is, you might say, a necessary set of illusions that enable the child to acclimate to its society. Different children will see things differently, and will certainly hold different values (largely shared by their environment), but chances are they’ll see things as black or white. It is what you would call the default position. In the absence of a specific factor modifying the child’s life, that’s how he or she will see things.

Yes. Children follow rules.

Or disobey them, but even the disobedience is forbidden fruit, because the rules are there and they do not doubt it.

So, whatever rules you accept, you accept. Even if you defy them, you do so within the context of accepting them. But as you live your life, you find that black and white is only a crude approximation. Not only may appearances deceive (good guys turning out to be bad guys or vice versa), but, more disturbingly, the very whiteness, the blackness, may turn out to be really shades of grey, so that in truth you see darker grey and lighter grey, not black and white. And this may feel like disillusionment, but in reality it is an increase in sophistication.

And it often gets people into trouble.

It does. But then, most things have the potential to get people into trouble. That doesn’t mean they’re undesirable. It hurts to grow up, but it’s worthwhile.

Hmm, Josephine Tey’s novel To Love and Be Wise.

Yes, there’s an example of someone who realized that black and white are not what she thought. This doesn’t mean there is no such thing as right and wrong, only that it’s rarely as simple as it seems.

What I know of the world I know pretty much second-hand, from novels and films and history and biographies, but it seems to me that the worst villains and the best saints are closer together than we like to think.

You remember George Ritchie’s lines of doggerel?

Something like,

“There’s so much good in the worst of us,

And so much bad in the best of us,

That it ill behooves any of us

To find fault with the rest of us.”

That isn’t it, but it’s close.

And this is what you would expect. All those strands, intertwined in any given 3D individual? How likely is it that someone would be (could be) all good or all bad – even if “all good or all bad” meant anything?

Hence, we should forgive others and should forgive ourselves for what neither of us could possibly help.

Well – you are responsible for your decisions, on an on-going basis. But fortunately, that means you can always change course. Even if you cannot amend your external life, you can re-decide about your values, and this is what is going to count. What kind of habit-pattern are you going to deliver to the non-3D by the end of your ride?

Can we pull together the various threads we laid out?

Certainly. A common denominator is the question of “What game is it that we’re playing, and what are the rules, and how do we tell if we’re winning?”

Or, “Who’s in charge here?”

That too. Everyone needs a sense of meaning, a sense of reality. In its absence, some will choose to believe in “meaninglessness” as an explanatory principle, because everybody needs something to believe in, even if that something is nothing. Those living as if this 3D world is self-explanatory and is all there is (or, as they usually say, is all that anybody can prove exists), must find something in 3D to explain their being.

Implicitly.

Certainly not explicitly. Most people don’t set out their beliefs, they live them, and usually pretty unconsciously. So, if they accept society as they find it, they may be law-abiding citizens channeling their time along commonly accepted patterns: career, family, pleasures as they can afford them. If they begin law-abiding and realize that the ground rules are themselves rotten, or let’s say have rotten spots, they may allow themselves to do many things they would not have done when right and wrong were black and white and absolute. Or, they may become more rigid in upholding things as they are, seeing no good alternative to even flawed rules. Or, they may revolt from an early age, seeing society’s inequities and injustices and deciding to get what they can get.

Thus crooks, or materialist consumers, or fanatics.

That’s an uncharitable but reasonably accurate way to summarize it.

With the additional consideration of a non-3D element to reality, though, choices have new possibilities. You still have a gradation from believers in absolutes all the way to believers that there are no absolutes, but the frame of reference is different.

Yes, now it goes from religious fanatics to – what shall we call them? – the fanatically irreligious.

Again, uncharitable but not so wrong.

It feels like we’ve barely begun, but there’s an hour gone.

At that, perhaps we’ve said all that need be said. Those interested will ponder it, and will make of it what they can.

So, the theme? What would it be?

Why not, “Black, white, grey”?

Not bad. Okay, till next time. Our thanks as always.

ac