You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Quick question if you don't mind.
Well, by observation, a little bit of B and a little bit of D.
I'm not sure if this would change if there was some sort of viable plan for A available, though.
Well, by observation, a little bit of B and a little bit of D.
I'm not sure if this would change if there was some sort of viable plan for A available, though.
Thanks for the honesty, do you mind if I ask why you think joining in on the destruction is viable if a clear solution isn't? You seem like a very logical fellow. And your reasoning has me a bit curious.
I don't know that it's viable; I'm not consciously pursuing it as a strategy. It's just my empirically observed behavior.
I might theorize something about human frailty, personal inconstancy, and a general inability to make fighting entropy the first priority at all times.
I may also take a broader view of D than others. I used plastic straws this weekend, I stayed in a hotel in a city where cleaning staff is vastly racially divided, I ignored a local police shooting because I was busy with other things, I'm short the market. All of those are D-ish.
At the same time what I was doing during all of that was working to help myself and others make better, more thoughtful, more humane art, which is very much B. There are tradeoffs there that I have no confidence that I'm making efficiently, but I think some level of tradeoff is inevitable.
I see. I appreciate the last paragraph. That's cool! And I tend to agree with a good portion of that. Though.. Even if it was hopeless, wouldn't it still be better to try to help than to join in on the destruction? I guess that's what puzzled me a bit about what you said since you seemed to entertain A if there was a viable solution, but.. In this case, who knows if there is or isn't.. There may be something we can do, and it may be impossible.. I don't think that will be known until it is either tried or not tried after the fact.
Thanks for further clarifying your position!
There's a balancing act between what needs to be done, what I can be effective at, and what I can motivate myself to do. I've found that if I let what needs to be done dominate, I end up doing nothing.
One of the insidious things about the way destruction is built into the system is that there are all sorts of places where participating is lower-overhead than not participating. If you want to "play defense" as it were, and never be complicit, if that's even possible it would inevitably take all of your resources just to manage it.
So I'm willing to take some of that lower overhead from complicity and inject it into playing offense in the areas where I'm more effective. Like I said before, I have no idea if I'm doing it efficiently, but most of the time I'm able to do worthwhile things, and that's important. (What we'd call "protagging" in the fiction world: taking an active role in your circumstance.)