Strawperson
I'm tired and a little angry, so if nobody minds, I have a harangue saved up. If it drags just skip to the quote.
Scene: The little Goth girl sits there and bemoans how "nothing matters", how "it's all meaningless", and how we can never find said meaning etc. I have had enough of her shit. I turn to the audience and speak:
"First, what the fuck is a statement like "it's all meaningless" supposed to indicate? It's always struck me as stringing together abstract concepts into a gramatically coherent sentence. It is abuse of the system that originally evolved to allow you to say "pass that rock", or "you will not have my meat". Second, how in fuck's name is it possible to think that? Granted, in a sense, (and I hate qualifying rants) that is true. Your life or death are comparatively meaningless from the vantage of the solar system, or the biosphere, from the point of view of nations or corporations, institutions and social networks you are unaffiliated with. But that is most assuredly not your vantage point, dear. Your vantage is you! And all the fucking meaning and lack thereof proceeds from some firing neurons in your skull. To you and those touched by you (me, for instance) there is meaning associated with you. From me. From you. From others. All your pains and all your hatreds and all your looks and your approval and/or disapproval attaches meaning. It's what we do as humans. Non-animate things do not do that. They have no need of this subjective barometer. It is not your place to insist on objective menaing. Our deal is intersubjective. And with that big word I'll leave it at that."
"(What meaning means is something best left to the recursive mathematicians, certainly not vapid French pop-philosophers. They are either shit-bags, or so profound I have no idea what they are saying. It matters not.)"
"I think I'll provide an analogy, then explain it. Hopefully it will be obvious what I mean. When I was young I did not have a computer. I got along fine. Then I got a computer. All was well. Then the computer boke down. I wept bitter curdled tears. This is a perfect demonstration of the Hedonic Treadmill Effect, one of those wonderfully applicable psychological theories. Anyway, I think our little Goth gitl is depressed and meaning-deprived because someone once told her of an invisible superhero that could observe the universe at all times. She thought that from that vantage point she was meaningless. (She was.) And even though she knows better than to kneel before the stone temple of the invisible superhero, the idea of that supreme vantage point still ingers. And she cannot go back. She can unlearn about the supreme vantage point no more than I can just scrap my computer and leave, whistling into the night. If we want slightly better-adjusted people, we should never have raised their expectations with caressing supernatural lies. They spend their entire lives beooding disappointingly on their losses of immortality. But they never fucking had it! They were never meaningful in that grand scale, but some in every leat their respective genies out of their respective bottles. It's not so much a recomendaion as a gripe."
Exeunt.
Consider: "O Rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night / In the howling storm, // Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy."
Scene: The little Goth girl sits there and bemoans how "nothing matters", how "it's all meaningless", and how we can never find said meaning etc. I have had enough of her shit. I turn to the audience and speak:
"First, what the fuck is a statement like "it's all meaningless" supposed to indicate? It's always struck me as stringing together abstract concepts into a gramatically coherent sentence. It is abuse of the system that originally evolved to allow you to say "pass that rock", or "you will not have my meat". Second, how in fuck's name is it possible to think that? Granted, in a sense, (and I hate qualifying rants) that is true. Your life or death are comparatively meaningless from the vantage of the solar system, or the biosphere, from the point of view of nations or corporations, institutions and social networks you are unaffiliated with. But that is most assuredly not your vantage point, dear. Your vantage is you! And all the fucking meaning and lack thereof proceeds from some firing neurons in your skull. To you and those touched by you (me, for instance) there is meaning associated with you. From me. From you. From others. All your pains and all your hatreds and all your looks and your approval and/or disapproval attaches meaning. It's what we do as humans. Non-animate things do not do that. They have no need of this subjective barometer. It is not your place to insist on objective menaing. Our deal is intersubjective. And with that big word I'll leave it at that."
"(What meaning means is something best left to the recursive mathematicians, certainly not vapid French pop-philosophers. They are either shit-bags, or so profound I have no idea what they are saying. It matters not.)"
"I think I'll provide an analogy, then explain it. Hopefully it will be obvious what I mean. When I was young I did not have a computer. I got along fine. Then I got a computer. All was well. Then the computer boke down. I wept bitter curdled tears. This is a perfect demonstration of the Hedonic Treadmill Effect, one of those wonderfully applicable psychological theories. Anyway, I think our little Goth gitl is depressed and meaning-deprived because someone once told her of an invisible superhero that could observe the universe at all times. She thought that from that vantage point she was meaningless. (She was.) And even though she knows better than to kneel before the stone temple of the invisible superhero, the idea of that supreme vantage point still ingers. And she cannot go back. She can unlearn about the supreme vantage point no more than I can just scrap my computer and leave, whistling into the night. If we want slightly better-adjusted people, we should never have raised their expectations with caressing supernatural lies. They spend their entire lives beooding disappointingly on their losses of immortality. But they never fucking had it! They were never meaningful in that grand scale, but some in every leat their respective genies out of their respective bottles. It's not so much a recomendaion as a gripe."
Exeunt.
Consider: "O Rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night / In the howling storm, // Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy."
posted by A. D. at 9:46 PM
2 Comments:
Wow, what a way to generalize. Goth and all.
No one is quite as one-dimensional.. at least I don’t believe them to be. Highs and lows do exist.
But I guess to each their own...
You're right. That's why I titled the post "strawperson"; you know, the idea of misrepresenting someone's argument and then shooting it down. I know that's what I did. I acknowledge it. I wasn't in a place for any reasoned post. I need my diatribes. For balance, I guess.
Cheers!
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