And fuck you China. You sure as fuck get it.
Tear down your dictatorship. Let the People be free.
Knowledge is not facts and wisdom is not the same as calculating things accurately and quickly.
AI is a quick path to merging human minds with all the worst aspects of it, all the things that don’t really matter. I will go so far as to call it Satanic, in chaining minds to the most base, most material, most fallen aspects of our lives. There is nothing expansive about owning an enormous library in your mind, or in putting the calculator in your brain.
Feelings are what matter, and I see no one trying to learn how to amplify, clarify, and unconfuse those.
Every day I see headlines like this, and wonder how true reason and decency can survive. Then I look around my room, and think: this is pretty fantastic. I may live in a one bedroom apartment, but I like it. I am a king by the standards of most of the world. Nobody is fucking with me yet. I have my health, my freedom, and enough money to not worry most of the time.
Our minds conjure 10 disasters, at least, for every one which actually happens. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil therein.”
In any event, in the dream I put my arm around this person and said “you and I are nothing alike at all. That means we have a GREAT DEAL to teach one another.”
I share this (and not the rest of a really wild [like all dreams aren’t wild] dream) because I thought that was an interesting idea: we learn the most from people unlike us.
Diversity–GENUINE diversity–is a worthy ideal. It is simply another example of what I might call the soupification of the American mind that HiveMind is claimed to be diverse simply because the faces within it differ, as does what they do with their genitals.
But intellectual diversity, emotional diversity, diversity of thought, opinion and practice: that is enormously useful in building larger, not smaller, minds.
And the goal of a UNIVERSE-ity is, in fact, to build larger minds. When it builds smaller minds, when people contract as a result of their exposure, this is a patent and really inexcusable failure.
Here is the thing about intelligence. The first conclusion smart people reach when dealing pragmatically with clearly defined problems is that clear thinking is WORK. Even for smart people.
So many of the people walking the street today think that thinking is someone else’s problem. This makes those willing and able to do this work pure gold. Most rich people are rich mainly because, among much other hard work, they did the work of THINKING.
You are not truly stupid until you decide that it’s other people’s jobs to tell you what to do. Particularly if you reached this conclusion from a low starting IQ—meaning you are unwilling to do the work of self improvement—you can with justice be called an idiot. I don’t judge incapacity, but I do judge the habit of not even trying.
Edit: I’m lying. I do judge stupid people, as I see it, for being stupid. My kids get after me all the time for this, because in point of fact I AM sometimes stupid myself.
I try to take this into consideration, but often fail. The type of stupidity that drives me up the fucking wall is the one which doesn’t even realize it is stupid. The stupid people who think they are smart because they have misread life’s countless signs, and retained a farcically high self regard. I am in the very highest echelon of intelligence, and I CONTINUALLY inspect my self and my actions to see if I am inadvertently being stupid. Because often I am. It is the lack of that that irritates the hell out of me.
Main point: it seems to me that there are three stages of traumatic expression, when it comes to the amygdala.
The outer, least healed layer is anger. It is pushing out against the world, and nearly entirely unreflective.
The middle is fear. Terror. Unnameable, formless fears.
The inner is shame. Shame has a form and a texture. It is highly unpleasant, but it is the path to healing.
I seem to be at the shame level. I keep having dreams of people telling me all the ways I’m fucking up, and who make me feel inferior. Both of my parents did that, in their own ways, but none of this has been truly accessible to my emotional, primary awareness until now.
Sweet the sin
Bitter taste in my mouth
I see seven towers
But I only see one way out
You got to cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice
You know I took the poison
From the poison stream
Then I floated out of here
You know, this woman is the target of my salvation. My problem, is that I am crying alongside her.
My job–I feel this clearly–is to find the fucking way out. It’s my job. It’s why I’m here. I feel this grief and alienation so clearly, so cleanly.
One day I hope to be useful. I will not ever try to claim I am useful, though, until I know how to sleep through the fucking night without shaking and screaming.
My work continues. You know: I falter often, but in the end, I don’t quit. Ever. Ever.
And you know, I would offer my body up in a moment if I could put an end to this.
Here is my own thesis: after some early actual success with Bottlerocket, I think he (and perhaps Owen Wilson, who cowrote it with him, and who seem to share with him somewhat similar prep school backgrounds) was trying to proactively exorcise a particular self important “artiste” demon within himself. He filmed it on the grounds where he went to school, where he put on plays, where he himself was perhaps even hyperactive in school activities.
I think he has, or had, a little Max Fisher in him, and he wanted to put it on screen in a way he would not forget. I also think some of his best artistic ideas came from some of his worst ideas when he was a kid making films. In his satire of mediocre plays he is perhaps mocking himself, too. As he says in the commentary, he once staged a three act reenactment of the Alamo that consisted of nothing but battle scenes. He also tried to stage Star Wars in I think it was second grade, with predictable results.
Out of all his films, this is the one where I get to the end and still feel little sympathy for the main protagonist. Even in Bottlerocket you had to admire Owen Wilson’s enthusiasm, sort of. In any event, you couldn’t see him screaming at waiters thirty years hence, and throwing things at his girlfriend, and having meltdowns in public following bad reviews.
And I think most of us had crushes on older women when we were teens. I know I did. When you are a fifteen year old boy, you are not thinking clearly. But with Max, it wasn’t going to get much better, it seemed to me. He is most likely a narcissist, perhaps even a sociopath. He has a great father, but I didn’t get the sense that his father was an influence so much as someone he sometimes spent time with to make himself feel smarter.
Who knows? They were young when they wrote this. It’s definitely my least favorite Wes Anderson.
I don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of this sooner.
This is a bit of an unexpected discovery however.