Sounds good. A warm welcome to Steemit!
I am looking forward to your postings.
One thing I already want to point out - and of which you certainly are aware of is what you said about
The last thing I want is to be another voice among many, propagating ideologies, beliefs and opinions that I inherited from elsewhere, or that were programmed into my mind subliminally without my knowledge.
You will be a voice among many who inherited some form of ideology from elsewhere as this is unavoidable. To track ones owns bias and be aware of it is one of the hardest things a person can do as it has the potential to crush ones identity which can become a dangerous thing for a human being:)
One example I heard of just yesterday was a woman giving a talk about plutocracy and that modern people will have to cope with an adjustment of their average income to countries like China. Although this does not seem unreasonable from a global point of view, from the point of view of the individual - whom the lecturer described as the "middle class" - it is an occasion to activate ones pain body (sorrow and rebellion in mind).
I much appreciate your method to challenge bias and ideology. I am very curious how it will work out for you.
Self-talk is something I do a lot.
Thank you kindly for the thoughtful welcome. I do agree that it is impossible to escape all conditioning and that it's very likely I will forever hold some concepts in my mind that were placed there as opposed to constructed in there. But I meant only that I would hate to be the type, as I have been in the past, to push beliefs onto others that I've not taken the time to scrutinise fully. I see no problem with sharing opinions that one has truly fashioned from their own discernment. But at the same time I do not intend to offer any final opinions upon the topics I will be debating against myself here. I will leave the conclusion open and invite thought from the readers.
It is abundantly clear that you are a deep thinker. I hope and expect to have some of the arguments I will be making challenged by your mind as well as my own.
I recognize myself in your words:
What a good way to put what you have in mind. Yes, I think I am going to be interested in what you are going to publish.
It seems that you were having a look into my blog. I do like to think deep but mostly I can give credit more to others than myself. I do have to learn a lot and probably will never be finished. Maybe also I became a little bit rusty as learning gets slower than it used to be for me.
So we will have some productive encounters. Are you a native English speaker? Where are you from if I may ask?
I posted an argument for and against a topic today, but in truth it did not feel right at all. I was not really challenging my beliefs and realise it would be far more fruitful for me engage in a very real debate with myself. The reason I chose the one argument for and one argument against set up, was because I wanted to leave my opinions and conclusions out of it, so that people could make up their own minds about their feelings and not be swayed by me. But, I think the best approach now would be to, when choosing a subject, write in detail why I feel the way I currently do about it, and then pick it apart line for line in a following post, and to repeat the process until I have arrived at a resolution I feel good about.
So I'd not advise you bother to read the first two posts. There's little self scrutiny if any in them. Tomorrow I aim to do it in the way I just mentioned, which I think will be far more worth a read and more likely to yield questions that lead to meaningful answers.
I would feel quite dishonest to continue this conversation with you without informing you that I am @son-of-satire. I no longer have access to that account, but when I created this one, I sought through my followed list on there for my favourite blogs so that I could populate my home feed.
Can I ask though, why you asked, if I am a native English speaker or not? Do I not seem like one? I suppose I do have a particularly dated style of writing.
That's what I call a surprise! Hello! we had a bit more intensive contact in the past! Thank you for telling me.
You seem to reinvent yourself. That is quite good sometimes.
I certainly look in on you.
On my question about the language: I said that more in relation to my non-English mother tongue. Your vocabulary speaks clearly for your good English. I sometimes have problems expressing myself as I do in German. But that is and remains a good exercise for me.
Anonymity is sometimes quite delightful. It has its advantages and disadvantages. If I remember correctly, are you from Great Britain?
Good night for you. I will rest now.
Yes we have had more than a few discussions in the past, ones of great depth and usefulness to me, which is why I felt it only fair to inform you of who I am.
I do not believe I have reinvented myself, though. Perhaps it would be beneficial in many ways if I did. If I could replace my core values and see the world the way many others appear to, I think many of my problems would disappear very quickly. But it's a lot easier said than done, and I'm not convinced, whether it would help me or not, that I would like to be anyone other than who I am anyway.
I am surprised you seem to consider your English skills to be lacking. You are certainly one of the most eloquent that I have conversed with on this platform, and I do not recall a time when you have failed to articulate a point in a manner that I could understand. The unfortunate truth is that many who are native English speakers are unable to express themselves with clarity nowadays, so your ability to do so, and to do so very well, is quite astounding given it is a secondary language to you.
It's not really an effort to remain anonymous. I have another account I am using also, where I write fiction. If anyone asked me if I am SoS I would not attempt to hide it. But, I know how much preconceived notions of a person can alter a reader's perception of the words they are sharing, and so I can find very little reason to make a spectacle of who I am. Should I ever manage to acquire the funds to buy back my account, I will write on there again and the community can know that I am back. But in the mean time, I would really just like to keep a quiet presence and work towards improving my mind and my writing, and avoiding discussions and arguments about abuse I have realised I do not have the power to prevent.
I am indeed from the United Kingdom. Glasgow in Scotland to be specific.
It's my expectation that we shall be conversing again soon, so until then. Goodnight, and I hope you rest well.
I should have better said that your way of working on a topic follows a new approach. Your announcement to try something different here on this account was a reason for me to respond to it. When I translate my German into English, "reinventing yourself" is more like that. You see, it is indeed sometimes difficult to be linguistically correct.
I'd consider it unspectacular to reveal your identity. For my part, I appear with my real name and think it's not a form of a big deal to do, only that my readers can immediately see that I'm female and from Germany. I find this information useful in so far as the transnational conversations often lead to great misunderstandings in which, for example, political and economic circumstances differ so much from each other that you can completely misunderstand one point of view if you don't know where the other one comes from. I also identify with my gender, even if you really have to be careful not to overemphasise it. I like to know whether I am dealing with men or women, how old someone is and where they live.
My first questions in dialogue are precisely those that support me in being able to assess others.
This does not mean that I do not think that anonymity is not also attractive and that, for example, one wants to talk openly about some matters in which the identities of others - which I want to talk about - remain protected.
Also, because of anonymity I had some really funny encounters and misconceptions of a humorous nature which wouldn't have happened if I would have known gender, nationality and age.
But it is also very true what you say: the preconceived view about someone changes the feeling for the relationship. When I thought I didn't know you, you were like a blank page to me. Now that I know that we were already in touch, it has changed. But since you knew who I was, you balanced that aspect, which I highly appreciate. But it would probably have been quite exciting to keep the secret for a while, wouldn't it? ;-)
Perhaps there is after all a barrier in translation. This makes me wonder if I have not misinterpret other things you've said in the past.
I care less where someone is from, their gender, or how old they are. It's as I said about preconceived notions. I feel that if you just listen to what someone is saying and have no other information about them, your biases will be removed and you can just hear what they're saying. Of course, this in itself is a skill. Because it is easy if you're not paying attention to start projecting said biases onto people who are otherwise anonymous to you. It's easy to think, this is a forty-something man, I can tell because of how they speak. But if you can try and leave all judgements at the door, I find that communicating with someone can be much more fruitful when the words take priority over anything else.
Any excitement I might have gained through remaining anonymous would have been overshadowed by a feeling of dishonesty. Anonymity, for me, is better suited when you're talking to someone who you also do not know. When conversing with someone you do, pretending to be someone you're not, or hiding your true identity, seems entirely disloyal.
Are you aware that well over 50% of messages between people are based on body language?
;-)