Elliot Morris

The following is a personal crackpot essay that has nothing directly to do with tech.

This article is going to make an assumption. That assumption is that you, the reader, agree that personal individuality is, in some form, illusory. It tends not to matter if you get here via spiritualism, a capital G God, or even through a sort of compatibilist materialism as I have. It should be clear to you that we effect each other in ways that don’t have effective hard boundaries.

The most immediate consequence that falls out of that assumption is this well trodden perspective on self-love. To love others is to love thyself, generosity and selfishness are the same thing, there’s a theoretical ceiling on how contented one can make themselves without also trying to lift those around them, etc, etc. Isn’t that nice?

You know what, it is nice. It’s great even! It took me a fair while to get even this far, and I’ve still a ways to go in terms of applying this as practical philosophy.

In my 20’s, I fell into that classic computer-nerd trap of somehow thinking that my intellect was primary. The meat in my head was the actually important part of self (whatever the heck I thought that meant at the time), and the body that supported it was a detail, heck, an annoyance more than anything. I’m still paying for that stupidity with the habits I established through that period. You can see the similarities. Just as there was a necessary expansion in scope to encompass the body as part of self in order to explain phenomenological effects, the same sort of expansion is required here to encompass other “individuals”.

Looking back on it, I suspect this artificial limiting focus to my self-love even curtailed my intellect, rather than honed it, in the long view.

You know it’s disgusting isn’t it? How could I allow myself to fail like this? I have been missing the forest for the trees on several levels for decades at this point. It’s pitiful.

… See, that’s interesting. This sort of self-loathing. There’s a contradiction here isn’t there?

How can it be that I am conceptualizing love as this diffuse force that must be applied across the entire connected system to truly yield its miraculous results, but loathing seems so pointed on the traditional, individualistic “me”? Is that how I really feel, do I actually only loathe my traditional, isolated, individual self here?

No, I don’t. I am a bitter person chock full of loathing. Loathing for society, for government, for our economic system, for political leanings, for Margaret fucking Thatcher. Whilst it may feel like this loathing is externally directed, what it’s really doing is blaming others for my misery, hence, blaming myself.

This is a less comforting expression of the connectiveness concept. I’m not yet certain what my goal should be here. The symmetry is troublesome, as if I am right to love others as though they are myself, I must also be right to loathe others as if they are myself, which means loathing in that really deep, personal, unforgiving way one only really directs inward. I would be correct to blame others for my misery, they are me, we’re all making ourselves miserable and we all deserve it!

This is wrong. I don’t like it. The removal of self-loathing seems much, much less achievable than the addition of self love. Given that self-loathing and external loathing are the same thing, I find myself incapable of ceasing to spew hatred into the world.

This is intolerable, defeatist, in-actionable, but more than that I have this intuitive desire to simply not do this, to not direct this hatred and bile outwards onto others. I can’t explain why. This contradiction probably torpedoes much of this philosophy of connectiveness, at least as a formal system that can be explained. Nonetheless, it’s where I am, and human conception can host contradiction like nobody’s business.

So, what I’m going to do, for the moment, is leverage the illusion of individuality to pull a magic trick. In the same way personal relationships of trust tend to be built on intentionally sloppy accounting of obligations which bias towards generosity, I think we can do the same here. If through some magical, divine, nonsensical force we can merely choose to allow ourselves to love others in the same way we love ourselves, but decide that loathing, despite the fact that it irrationally breaks symmetry, does not get the same allowances, then we find ourselves miraculously creating a surplus of care in the universe.

This should remain a positive balance even if the amount of loathing I find myself generating is high, and the amount of love is small.

I have to gesture somewhat at personal divinity to make this work. The symmetry would trap me otherwise, as would the creeping tendrils of nihilistic determinism. Some form of transcendentalism is necessary for me to make any choice, and whilst the spark of divinity within me may be tiny and fragile, I have faith that it is enough to power this, at least for the moment.

Well, that was a whole lot of abstract crack-pottery for what ultimately boils down to “I’m going to try to be nicer to people.” Look, we all get there our own ways okay, give us a break!