The great thing about having your own blog is that from time to time you get to channel Calvin. No, no, Calvin and Hobbes, and neither John nor Thomas.
So my home was invaded by space monsters, pillaged, burnt down, and I was cast out and raised among tentacled strangers.
This causes you to ask questions about homes, fire, and strangers.
And I have been contemplating the role of judgement. What is its proper use? Is it to punish myself for infractions against a rule I either don’t understand, have not internalized, or secretly resent?
Is it to serve as a tool to elevate my sense of self worth relative to others?
Or is it simply the process of decision making itself, which resets in every moment of new decision? Does it not help to have heuristics in making decisions? Whether you eat beef or not, it serves as a guide to what you buy at the grocery store.
I am increasingly realizing that judgement is mainly a way of gaining a feeling of power over others, a feeling of superiority, which if you can get enough people to share it, becomes an actual way of making someone else feel like and in many cases accept being treated like, an inferior. It becomes an ACTUAL source of physical power to coerce and control.
Self evidently, judgement is the tool without which there is not social coercion. Judgement is a political tool, therefore, inherently.
And I keep thinking to myself about my seeming need to help people. That is laudable on some levels, I think. I can and have spent hours listening to people. I can and have done things I thought would help. But as often as not, I seem to make things worse. I am clumsy. And I wonder if some part of me secretly feels that if I can get someone to be weak in front of me, that it makes me feel stronger by comparison. I wonder if I don’t take some comfort from an abysmal sense of relative better-ness.
Lao Tzu wrote “Renounce Sainthood: it will be a thousand times better for everyone”. I really believe that. As I come to know myself, I see that almost every positive impulse I have had a shadow to it, and I feel strongly that this is a generalized problem. It is me, but it is not just me.
There is another side. I am not being pessimistic. On the contrary, whenever I can find something awful about myself, well hell, that means it’s on its way out. The fucking thing was hiding, and I found it. And I found it, because I was looking. And I was looking because good enough isn’t. This life is an amazingly interesting adventure, and I intend to do what I can to learn as much as possible, even when it hurts like hell.
But I think most of that is done. I think it will be increasingly a matter of skillful navigation, of detecting subtle changes, and moving as needed to stay in the current.
