Vice List - part 3

Which takes us to the third (fourth) interview of the Video. Or, more to the point, the matter of desires, passions - and sure enough: Women.

I think it does deserve special attention, as a matter at large, how this issues have been dealt with historically. And perhaps, on a side-note, how I personally deal with it, my identity and the whole round about.


There are moments, on and off, where I feel dragged into "being a man" - which is somewhat similar to how back in the day I felt being dragged into exposing my Clarity. But there are some differences. Differences I can, possibly, at best only talk about; As there is no way to 'show' any of it - other than perhaps latching onto my female identity as upheld by God. Which may not be super tangible, but sure - it's a thing.
And yea - maybe the right words can do the one or the other trick; Much to the criticism then, that it's also really just words. And so we're stuck with words against words - and how either party inhabits these words. Where - it sucks to be me because when it comes to that - my voice ... my real life physical voice ... is like a score for the other side.

But, as for words, and what worth there lies in them, the same is somewhat true for here - where my physical voice doesn't matter - and it's all just how things make sense to you. I ... wouldn't know about that though. And while I maybe might get a sense of that, overlaid onto that ... is my own impression. Here I don't feel like a man - but I feel a lot of things that manliness and masculinity and all that ... would seek to achieve or embody.

It is there a little bit of an irony, that people would argue that women are emotional, irrational and all that; While emotionality and irrationality is very well just as much at the core of masculinity as it is at the core of femininity. The only difference being ... the way it's coded. To a bunch of monkeys (fictitious) it may be perfectly rational to boast up like King Kong displaying their dominance at each other to figure out who's boss - and yet there really isn't anything resembling like ... 'real' rationality therein.
Other than - 'rationality' in the sense of 'how the brain works'.

So, we can note that down. There is rationality like that, we might say: Biological rationality - versus rationality in the sense of deductive reasoning.


As for here, it somehow happened that desires and passions are lumped in with the female sex. Much to the rationale of how it's like a stranger thing to the male perspective we behold through the scriptures - or corresponding cultural attitudes.
The female side is thereby that ... "respective other" ... at which point feminism tunes in along the lines of cultural evolution; Where we eventually move from this estrangement to something more closely resembling a partnership.

Maybe that was too much at once, but - at first it does certainly look as though ... men are scared of the female aspects of reality. And ... hmm ... . I think we need a good word for ... the matters of the formative era of existence. The time round about the first insight down to where things eventually settled. Into this physical world perhaps. Where the masculine is the thought, the insight, the glory. The manifestation that delivered light into the dark. Like a little sperm swimming into that enormous egg. The female hereby being this dark and scary ... infinite void that would respond with chaos and disarray to the conscious attempts at making sense of reality.

And maybe we can push this further. As the sperm enters the egg and unites with it - the egg ... starts to splinter; And life takes it's course as that which used to be one continues to break up into more and more at an exponential rate - as, per chance, a way of saying that this unified simple truth ... is impossible to maintain. And soon enough "the mess" has become so complicated that it seemingly develops a life of its own; Breaking apart even the last shred of what peace and quiet might have been left. And this new organism, it keeps on growing until eventually ... it takes its first breath, now ready to really take on a life of its own.

This does certainly mirror the events of the origin. While we start with one singular insight - eternal life - what follows is: Oh there is substance, oh there is meaning, oh there is insight ... I can think, I remember ... existence is real, what am I? Where am I? And what started as a drop of water - was eventually revealed to be an ocean.


It is, possibly, a right or good approach on the matter. To see how desires and passions, as properties of the feminine, correspond to the apparent chaos that humankind found itself in upon braving the wild. Motions that would seem to defy logic and reason - seemingly bent against the ordering and structuring ambitions of mankind.

So, life would be simple with a man at the head of a family - or any hierarchy for that matter. Almost symbolically holding the disruptive powers at bay, or perhaps: by a leash - instilling the odem of success into the attempts at dominating nature.
The only perceivable threat to that would be that of unleashing this uncontrollable force of chaos - to let it slip from one's grip ... and risk it engulfing the world - forever to be lost to whatever heartbeat might emerge in it, ushering in a new age to forever overshadow the old the order.

And yea, we are duly past the time of hypothesis on this one. We don't need to wonder or theorize about what it might bring; And a part of it describes gender as residing on a spectrum.
Rightfully so. For, whatever grew from that union between sperm and egg - it is made of both; And along the binary encoding of the genes is mostly bound to express itself as either; Yet ... inevitably - is a product of both.

And so the true story of the origin, that it is neither the male or the female aspect that would eventually win over - but a harmony of the two that would express itself in a singularity.


What now ... constitutes as a desire? Or a passion? This ... so called ... female irrationality? I mean, if we wanted to argue against desires - I sure have a lot of material to draw from. Is it a lot? Well, speaking of my Clarity I would sooner or later also get to the topic of wanting, desires and passions - and in that context deliberate against those. At first I might only speak of my own condition - and from there I might move on to argue how that condition is preferable. And doing that, becomes a balancing act eventually. On the one side there's the clear advantage and implied necessity to exercise control upon ones urges - to hone the chaos into something orderly; And on the other side there are the more explicit ways in which that manifests within me. That my wanting is inhibited, that my desires are regulated. So much so that I could easily externalize these intimate, individual truths of mine to regard 'love without wanting' as something to be aspired.
But, opposed to that, people might be confused to learn that these ... inhibitions only seem to strengthen, inflate, expand, enhance ... the very thing some might think they should remove. And subsequently, on perhaps a slightly different note, there's the argument that these inhibitions are unnatural. That they take away my freedom as a human bing. Which is how we get to the jumping point (the 'jumping' point: A German expression (der springende Punkt) as to say: The point of relevancy) - which is, in respects to this example, that one set of desires is merely replaced by another. In a more general sense then: That's always going to be the case.
The very desire to curb one's own desires - is, you might realize, a desire in and of itself. So, I argue: More often than not, what people mean when they criticize desires or embolden passions - isn't so much the desire or the passion itself - but the associated consequence. So it wouldn't be desires that are bad, but desires with a certain outcome that are. And, sure enough, making a case for that is part of that balancing act I mentioned before.

To redeem this discussion, at least briefly, from the baggage of qualified value - we can speak of desires as being either the thing in control, raw and unfiltered, or channeled through a rationale. As I'm thinking of a way to visualize this - I think the picture of a man pulling a truck versus a man driving a truck makes for a good image. But it doesn't allow for as much nuance as I would like.
But we might say that for desire to be good, it needs to be channeled through rationality; For otherwise it's irrational - or, so-to-speak: Female/feminine. But what if the rationality is flawed? Contrast this possibility with something as "female" as compassion. For ... however much rationality you may want to ascribe to it - at the end of the day it would be rationality that more often than not corrupts it. For better or for worse? Well, I'd argue that one thing that would determine that, were the quality of the rationale that's being employed.
With the added disclaimer, that any motif of compassion would greatly benefit from rationality - to however act upon the compassion as opposed to trying to take its place.


And yea, eventually we might want to - or have to - talk about rationality; And in this context, of its flaws. Rationality can be biased. This bias may be built on pre-established conclusions; Which ... well ... may be some flavor of emotional - but would as integral to a person's rationale be regarded as 'logical'. And sure enough, emotions can function as components of a logics network; Regardless of whether or not their presence there is ... all that reasonable.

Which is, to me, one way of saying that arguments that try to criticize either of the implied mechanisms ... are utterly misguided. I mean, one of the wildest examples of such misguidance I've witnessed, was an attempt to slander an argument for the utility of certain idea - by calling it 'utilitarian'. It's like criticizing a car for having wheels. Like ... what are you talking about?

The short of it all, to not dwell on this for too long, is that while it is an impossibility to remove emotions from the equation, it is more reasonable to learn how to properly incorporate them.


I mean - well. Sometimes it's difficult to explain certain things - and if people can draw upon visual aids to do so, they're usually taking it. Why wouldn't we? In more difficult conditions where no such visual aids exist, we might want to produce them - as so by a thought experiment. Sometimes however they are rather clunky. It's like ... if you have a simple equation like 1+X=Y - to solve something like 7*Y=whatyouwannasay; Whereby the matter of X would fill out several pages and the other side constantly reminds us of Z at every step of trying to work out X. But sometimes then ... reality offers us X's on its own. And sometimes ... we have to make them.
So - take the previous statement, that of incorporating emotions, as a thought experiment if you will. I mean, you are entirely free to oppose the idea that it's impossible to remove emotions from our rationale; Thus maintaining a position from which you could criticize a rationale for being emotional. But nonetheless have I just said what I wanted to say. The degree to which you think that emotions can be removed from rationale thereby being your bias that I have no sway over. And yea, so - we can talk about science and how the scientific method is designed to remove emotions from a rationale; Yet in doing so we admit that we need special tools to accomplish that.

And so - yet leaving this variable in the equation ... is what would further down the road empower disagreements. Even if it might just be fueled by an irrational fear ... from learning how to deal with your emotions properly.
Maybe in due time there will be better ways to explain this - maybe it's at this point really just me, making this unnecessarily complicated. But it still makes for a good example of how here the flaw isn't as much in my reasoning as it is within our biases.


Maybe a nice allegory to further explain this, is to speak of reaching light speed. Due to how the laws of physics, as we understand them, work - light speed isn't infinite but works as though it were. So, while it may be theoretically possible to produce enough (a.k.a.: Infinite) energy to reach light speed - it makes more sense to find other ways to maybe accomplish something similar or maybe even better.


So yea, call me emotional or too female or whatever - for making this super female point on how emotions are, or can be, good actually; While being typically female-irrational as I move on to accept it as a given while ignoring points to the contrary. The thing is - yet and nonetheless and overall - that emotions are after all life-giving.

Although emotions aren't exempt from ... how to put it? "producing cognitive labor"? I mean, emotions can be stressful, difficult to deal with, a burden - such and such - as much as rationality can. Both can be misguided, both can give us an easy way out of something - and bot can do incredible work, even in areas they're supposedly bad at. I mean - rationality is really good in areas that involves math. As to say that it took more than just hopes and dreams to successfully get people onto the moon and back. But I doubt that people who can throw balls with near mathematical precision do the math in their heads. Or, ever so often, a game of strategy can be won by following something as irrational as intuition.

I mean - don't we, usually, celebrate these ... feats ... of ... "applied irrationality"?


Well, the thing is that there isn't really an Aeon of emotions. There is Grace, Truth and Form - and the strength of emotions is that they are just really complicated truths. Respectively can they be irrational - but also can they just be better than what we could piece together from atomic ideas.

Non empirical reasoning? Well - emotions aren't Love (the Aeon) - and whoever tries to tell you otherwise is probably trying to bamboozle you. If such a thing exists.


But - whatever the case ... so: What are desires? It is easy to take things we'd deem desirable ... and ... talk of them as of desires. I mean ... that's wild ... I guess. Very ... radical. But so a disconnect would occur - as we'd try to remove desirable things from the realm of desires. As mind-blowing as it might seem - it's also really just the tip of the iceberg.

One relevant case to bring up here, from history, revolves around compassion and rationality. And by that I mean the kind of compassion that Christ promoted by helping the poor and the sick - as opposed to "putting someone out of their misery". In the modern day and age that conversation is somehow flipped on its head - where assisted suicide is being contrasted to murder.
We might take from this that compassion is on a spectrum - but that's neither here nor there right now. So, obviously I'm speaking of fascism. Or eugenics. The matter would stand to be a rational one - and pondering on it I came to realize that there is a very insidious manifestation of rationality that did sway a lot of people into doing horrendous things. Well, horrendous at least by my very own "female" standards.
But ... I guess ... fascists really managed to push the envelope on removing emotions from rationality. But did they? Or did they just replace one set of emotions ("Love") with another ("Hate")?

So, there is - at least for the sake of argument - an argument to be had that it's reasonable to just ... snuff out handicapped people and other "delinquents" against ... "the greater good of humanity". Emotionally however, that feeds into a certain sense of superiority that thereby demands authoritative respect in order to "do the good" "that ought to be done". One may argue that it's good for the economy because it creates jobs or at least it keeps the population somewhat busy - and overall can the matter of "doing the right thing" be measured against a very easy state of emotional integrity.
Conversely it would seem to be irrational to invest labor and resources into keeping handicapped people alive. So, what emerges is possibly best described as 'Cruel Efficiency'.

And still, what it does - rather than getting rid of emotions and desires and such - is that it creates space for all the negative ones. And so, I guess, people who yet want to maintain that this is the rational - and therefore good - side, also maintain that negative emotions and such are the actually good ones; And that those who "channel" them are the strong men that create the good times.

And yea, this line of reasoning is like an alternate reality to me. And when it comes to finding an instance of where we should really fight against our urges, desires, passions - whatever you wanna call them or however much you wanna add to that list - it's this. And that's how we come to 'true Christianity'. If you're an atheist you might not like that - but ... I take it as a Gnostic that it's the right thing anyway.


There are a few things that can be said here. I right now find myself arguing, that this may be a somewhat inevitable tipping point. Any "humanoid" species - on any planet - would eventually develop towards it (unless it self-destructs on the way to get there). And thereby some flavor of Christian thought would be what stands against fascism. It may be no co-incidence that things keep revolving around this.
To what effect all that would play out - or did play out in the history of the cosmos - is kind of hard to tell. And whether or not Christian thought is unique in that regard, or just another label for something rather common (well, socialism comes to mind) - also hard to tell.

So, on the one hand we might say that if God wanted us to be fascists, He wouldn't need to tell us so. On the other side we might argue that only by Christ are we capable of being real fascists - like - just barely good enough to not self-destruct. I keep on wondering thereby ... at which point would we recognize how silly this is?


Anyhow - so, I've spent all this time arguing in favor of the female side to the story - it'd be weird to now go and try to make it about rationality. It does however come as a kind of gut reaction, to try to fight fire with fire.
So - what I wanted to get at is, that as we can impossibly remove emotions from our reasoning - cultural cohesion, or how to call it, exists on a basis of emotions. No matter how rational an idea is that everyone would adhere to - the process of maintaining it will inevitably produce an emotional "context". If fascism is about emotional context emerging from rationality - ignoring whatever predispositions there may have been at play - what I like to see is the opposite of that. So, rationality emerging from emotional context.


To visualize the emotional context - I was thinking of the cloning of cells. So, as a culture would engage in heinous acts, an emotional context is promoted that then multiplies and evolves. Think ... Stanford Prison Experiment perhaps. And - I don't know if there's much evidence for what this evolution entails; If we so can safely predict what the end of it were - but I suspect it to be some kind of dystopian prison environment - as the matter of oppressors that need someone to oppress happens to be one of if not the dominant emotional context(s).

And so is an argument I've repeatedly made; That the end doesn't justify the means as much as the end mirrors the means. And if we make a healthy emotional context the means of what we do - we are practically bound to protect that which does arguably matter the most. And we might call that any number of things that, when taken out of context, may be taken to mean the opposite.


If your issue now is, that this isn't necessarily about desires or women - well, that's ... certainly kind of the point I was making. That reality isn't as black and white as that. That it is rather us; And how we conceive of the world around us that makes it so.

If we want to take this according to the Bible, we have to understand what Paul was up to. And regardless of how much regressive nonsense we can take from there - there still are a few things; More principled things, mind you; That speak against doing so.
To let faith in Christ transform you, may to some just be a metaphor for embracing whatever it is that the one or the other (so called) Christian tries to sell you as sound doctrine. One may thereby try to vindicate themselves by checking in how far one thereby aligns with the various beliefs put forth by Paul. Like ... are you misogynistic/sexist enough?
But is that ultimately what Christ died for?
I mean - to "stay" on topic, I have been an avid anti-SJW. And in as far as the respective positions still hold true, I might very well still be. But to equivocate that with what constitutes "anti-SJW"~ism today is just ... wrong! Which is to say that times do change - and what Paul may have seen as vices to rant against at first - may even have ceased to be of concern during his lifetime. The corresponding "virtues" being certainly the bigger problem nowadays.


Letting faith in Christ transform you, to me is more about adapting a higher frame of reference from where to judge things. And yea, the sentence "do not judge" happens to be a part of it. I thereby want to argue that there is a higher sense of community that did originally not exist. As per this primal chaos that we originated from; We yet had to develop a meaningful understanding of "shared reality" to even start comprehending it. And whatever God's reasons were for scattering us whenever we would adopt some semblance of it, might also just be due to an attitude problem on our part.

I mean, we could say that we're good at taking an idea that might unite us and getting people on board with it while making the rest just ... unable to disagree. The problem with religion so far has been, that ... well, we'd try to reproduce a sense of the divine from our sensibilities - whereas time and time again we had to learn that those were inadequate.

I mean, whatever rebuttal you could bring to the table ... be it against emancipation or sexual liberation ... or whatever else ... it certainly isn't rooted in this primal divine - where there is neither man nor woman, nor free nor slave - just one-ness in God. Some might think that this one-ness is to mean uniformity; Sameness - But I beg to differ. That in as far as "setting our differences aside" isn't the same as ... eradicating them to whatever end. Though if you really needed to, you'd have to take it further and argue that we should all be ... sexless, genderless, asexual pseudo-individuals.


I mean - I know how God nourishes me. And that isn't all one-sided. I have my Clarity - but ... I frequently find myself challenged on those matters. But then again ... it is what it is ... and it certainly isn't at odds with a sense of divine unity. What it is at odds with, is with drawing too tight a circle around what's acceptable.
Like so - what good is it to draw a circle so tight that diversity could not exist. I can thrive in an environment ... with people similar to me ... enjoying a wealth of things - that you don't have to be able to thrive in. And the same is true in reverse. And when we got together, none of it would matter. Unless one of us insisted on it.

And so the problem with desires or passions or women isn't the "thing" itself, but the ways in which false assumptions can hold us captive - and how irrational energy can prevent us from breaking free. But I will say: Perhaps male irrationality is "better" than female irrationality; Though it kind of depends. I mean ... the more overall rationality we have, the less any of it should matter. As ... any kind of insistence on it were to focus on the differences, branding one side as bad - but not the other; And that's ... just silly.


So ... could I say more? Right now ... I don't think so.
So - in case I could have or should have done better, I hope you can forgive me!
Until next time? - Maybe I'll just play some Street Fighter and let things settle a bit ...

hmm ... I guess ... it could have been about things other than fascism ... I'm sure a part of me is really ashamed of having failed at not taking it there. Or, I don't know. There's ... still something left that's bothering me and I don't know what it is.