Risto

"Pure beryl skies flout hungry soil,
        white banal claws rend blameless limbs.

Blue clouds admit, green hills decree,
        its just that red construes all whims."

-- Anwar Tudor-Jolies, from His Ancient Rose

Discomfort arises by adverse effects, does it not? But of course, we must discuss proximity. "The less confident we are in ourselves, the less we are in touch with ourselves and the world, the more we want to control."

However, if the yield of some foul propinquity is not discomfiture, then the proximity to be examined is internal. "Now, any time the child, in his development, is prevented from growth by the adult world, any time the child is spoiled by not being given enough frustration, the child is stuck. So instead of using his potential to grow, he now uses his potential to control the adults, to control the world. Instead of mobilizing his own resources, he creates dependencies. He invests his energy in manipulating the environment for support. He controls the adults by starting to manipulate them, by discerning their weak spots. As the child begins to develop the means of manipulation, he acquires what is called character. The more character a person has, the less potential he has."

Consider then the relation between degrees of tolerance and levels of inconsistency; systems and caprice. Sustainability begins with the realistic, and thus ethical assessment of ability.

It's okay, because it's just a few hours a day.

"[O]ver the past few months, my work and store have been busy and busier ... Somehow along the way, it became normal for [my daughter] to watch television every day ... What I didn't realise until later was that she was also growing into a miserable child. Much of the time she would be unhappy ... Not fun to take places or be with like she used to be. Everything a fight ... And so I broke the TV ... [and now we as parents] are very much stunned and are constantly gawking at the results -- for we absolutely have our wonderful sweet little daughter back again. Chatting, singing, dancing, dreaming up games ... She is co-operative, fun and easy-going. She makes up and plays her funny little games on her own, independently. She once again is a joy to be around."

Actually, it's good because it's educational.

"As far as [Dr. Dimitri] Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. ”There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better,” he says. ”But that's not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation.” His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. ”Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal,” says Christakis, ”and by comparison, reality is boring.”"

"History 2702E - Ten Days that Shook the World:

... the goal of the course is not to gain total knowledge of the world."

"They looked at each other in silence, almost wonderstruck, each of them, to see that the other was there, so far apart had their thoughts carried them."

-- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

It's strikes me that the things I find myself compelled to study are not, as I've been told they must be, the things I "love most." No, the things I find myself drawn to write about are in many ways quite the opposite of love.

I must understand the rituals of our tribe. The tribe whose members whole-heartedly and absent-mindedly defend coincidental and contingent versions of reality, when in reality they are all too unfamiliar with the vices that restrict perception, and readily plunge themselves into the comfortable immersions of invisible malice.

It is a curious medium, is it not, which permits an eruption of low self-esteem to manifest itself as a proclamation of devotion, and a peculiar system which permits despair to embellish itself in the face of impossible prosperity.

The ability to observe conditions is not unconditional worship, and unconditional worship is not affection. Though such monstrosities are not entirely of our own making, we are responsible for these juggernauts nonetheless. To realize love is to accept this responsibility, and accepting this responsibility means I will not "choose to just sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Now ... many people seem to think that if you talk about something ... then you're in favour of it. Well, the exact opposite is true in my case, anything I talk about is almost certain to be something that I am resolutely against, and it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."

When satisfying our needs by our own effort we develop a rich and immediate understanding of the relationship between our actions and their consequences, and our beliefs and ideas remain in contact with their physical foundations. Stated obversely, the further we move away from living by and with the direct results of our own efforts the less we are able to understand the impact of our choices and actions on ourselves and on others. Proportionately then, the greater the separation between nodes in the network of operations required to satisfy our needs, the larger the separation between our lifestyle and our appreciation of its consequences, and the more tenuous our understanding of our socio-material footprint. The greater this separation, the more dangerous the tenuity.

Tenuity increases with distance, and danger matures from possibility into reality if we respond to this conceptual distance with cleverness minus reason. When applying cleverness minus reason we display remarkable creativity in the construction of sophisticated justifications to explain the desideratum of satisfying our unreasonable needs and unsustainable systems. Conversely as regards coherence, and simultaneously as regards temporality, we exhibit equal or perhaps even greater rigidity when reacting and responding to arguments that are contrary to our own sophisticated justifications. We make short work of counter-arguments, and declaim the absolute necessity of maintaining and embellishing all structures that accompany the maintenance of our chosen needs-systems. Animals and thus humans are rationalization machines, and because of this even the slightest relaxation in intellective caution permits us to commit ourselves to reckless beliefs, resulting in the internalization of baseless apothegms. So it is that we defend the indispensability of some structure regardless of its real world costs, simply because of a personal affinity rather than an objective need.

Such rationalization processes are engaging because they exercise the intellect. However, such exertions are deceptive because they exercise intellection primarily at the level of conception required to defend the needs-systems in question and ignore levels of existence that are intimately if not always visibly connected to the the system's continuation. We hide from ourselves the many layers of reality with which our lives could not possibly be sustained, and in this way we justify the dissociation of high from low, the divorce of effect from cause, and the concealment of external impositions from personal consciousness. Important connections become insubstantial and nonessential peculiarities, and the consequences of our choices dissolve into the invisible environment.

"There is no prospect, in any time which we can conceive, that the whole invisible environment will be so clear to all men that they will spontaneously arrive at sound public opinions on the whole business of government. And even if there were a prospect, it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered, or would take the time to form an opinion on ”any and every form of social action” which affects us."

Accepting this, how should we proceed? If the problem is that experiential distance inhibits and eventually prevents conceptual -- and thus ethical -- coherence and clarity, can any solution to this problem include the maintenance and multiplication of bureaucracies based on administrative hierarchy, and based thus on experiential distance? That is, can any solution to this problem be based on the very thing causing the problem in the first place?

Returning to the level of individual consciousness and responsibility, the problem is described by Michael Moore. "I went to Littleton, Colorado, where the Columbine shooting took place, and ... when I arrived I learned what the primary job is of the parents of the kids who go to Columbine High School. The number one job in Littleton, Colorado: they work for Lockheed Martin building weapons of mass destruction. But they don't see the connect between what they do for a living and what their kids ... did at school. And so I'm ... up on my high horse thinking about this, and I ... said to my wife, we both are sons and daughters of auto workers in Flint, Michigan [and] there isn't a single one of us back in Flint ... including [the two of] us, who ever stopped to think this thing we do for a living, the building of automobiles, is probably the single biggest reason why the polar ice caps are going to melt and end civilisation as we know it. There's no connect between ”I'm just an assembler on an assembly line building a car” which is good for people and society and it moves them around, but never stop to think about the larger picture and the larger responsibility of what we're doing. Ultimately we have to as individuals accept responsibility for our collective action and the larger harm that it causes."

When reflecting on the relationship between needs and intelligence, how should our awareness of the phenomena discussed above inform our metrics? Does intelligence involve the reasonable exposition of connections, or the clever exaggeration of divisions?