And I had to laugh today when it hit me that I can’t self sabotage myself now. Unlike life, The game only goes forward. I would have to start a new game, and the whole deal with self sabotage is it has to be plausibly deniable. No one says “OK, now I’m going to fuck things up royally.” No, they just DO it, then either wonder what the fuck just happened, or KNOW what the fuck just happened, depending on their self awareness.
Then I got to thinking about Complexity Theory and Dancing landscapes. Here is the thing with life: you have never “made it”. You could be the blanking-est, blanking-est, and blanking-est (pick what you want: richest, most powerful, sexiest, most handsome, coolest) person in the world, and you will still die. You will still lose, or at least undergo, to my understanding, a phase transition.
And of course most of us are never blanking-est anything. And I look and see that the only way I can plan to avoid self sabotage is to develop the contrary habit of daily growth. It is not enough to try and avoid it. I have to get at the roots of it, and the way to do that is to GO THROUGH all the things that stand in the way of planned growth; to learn to walk steadily and confidently in a direction I have actually consciously chosen.
More generally, it seems to me if you are not growing, you are being left behind. That is the lesson of the Dancing Landscape. And I don’t mean economically, or at least not only. I simply mean that you are falling behind the learning that COULD have happened if you had chosen it as a daily activity.
If you are not growing, you are shrinking. I think that is a useful principle.
The other deep lesson of Assassin’s Creed is this: as a pirate in the Caribbean in the early 18th century I deal with a lot of British and Spanish. The game is quite violent, and most ships I take wind up being sunk, and all aboard, with few exceptions, implicitly killed. Believe it or not, it sometimes makes me sad, watching all the carnage, because I know these things really happened.
But more generally it got me to thinking that there really was no moral difference between the pirates and the conquistadors and imperialists. What does a pirate do? He shows up, shoots everyone who resists, and steals your stuff. What did the British do in their colonies? They showed up with guns, shot everyone who resisted, and said they were in charge and you now owe us taxes. They took slaves for a long time. In 1710 or so (I think that’s where we are in the story) they were still shipping Irish slaves to the Caribbean and “breeding” them with African slaves to make the children more valuable. I’m sure you can imagine what those scenes might have been like. These were the British, the ones we like to think of as the good guys, who all have charming accents and a marvelous and droll sense of humor.
And I think that none of these people were innocent. Very few, at any rate. Pirates were perhaps the most honest ones.
I do feel as well, though, that one must be very careful with this whole hypocrisy argument. I recently listened to Hunter Stockton Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, and felt strongly that what I was listening to was Cultural Sadeism, and it caused me to make some alterations to my theories. I’m still processing and will post on that later.
For now, I wanted to point out that Thompson no doubt rationalized his sundry crimes as “at least not hypocritical”. They were honest crimes, and he admits to them. Sade, too, found the only crime to be hypocrisy. What is the moral value of the charge of hypocrisy for such people?
It is this: they can distract others from their crimes by accusing everyone else of them, without ever articulating a morality. Saul Alinsky, of course, was a Cultural Sadeist and palled around with literal gangsters (remember Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife winds up allying with the protagonists in the Three Penny Opera). Everyone else was awful, he said. Why? They were HYPOCRITES.
Bait and switch, that is all. Look over there, he says, while he picks your pocket. Nothing meaningful has been said, and awful things left unjustified because unjustifiable.
One more thing: I think the phrase “psychologically harmful” could be substituted usefully for “immoral”. This is the crux of my argument. And there is no need to add “socially harmful”. If an individual knows something is socially harmful and does it anyway, this is psychologically harmful, even if that person is so far gone the added injury is invisible.