the hunchback of notre dame juxtaposes the matrix: the insecurity behind security in humanity's evolution

Persistence is the art of self determination, right?

That has nothing to do with the topic header, I just needed to tell myself that. 

I was contemplating one nondescript day, the difficulties of moving with true, anonymous freedom in our current world. I started to think about Frollo from Vitctor Hugo's tragic drama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, who had a mental breakdown and literally just hopped on a gondola and rode to the next town and essentially disappeared for many moments in the book. I was marveling at the freedom he experiences in the unsurveyed movement of his world. I feel pity for myself sometimes, because I live in the antidote to Gene Claude Frollo's emotional time away from his post; The landscape of The Matrix universe. 

I've actually never seen a Matrix movie! I know, I know. In any case, I understand the metaphor it intends to share with it's audience and grasp the general plot. In this universe, I understand there to be no freedom of movement. No matter which world Neo participates in, he is being watched. His every movement is followed, every word heard, and so on. It's Orwell, with (more) guns. No mystery. What's fascinating is how already, our media is depicting restraints of movement in every liberally gesturing piece. Something so solipsistic is is being used to influence and suggest conditions of surveillance to millions. With no anecdote conversations, or no graphically obvious ones, we are far more likely to accept this state. 1984 can tell you much more about this than I can, which makes me glad art is always around to observe these political and social change.

I do not think Frollo would accept this level of surveillance (This is a joke, because he was an alchemist. Sorry. I'll go.).

maybe it's brainwashing, maybe it's maybelline: a tangent of no significance

Who can cause the hippest addiction?

This is the game we're playing now.

Radio, television, video gaming, medicated conditioning, audio frequencies invisible to our consciousness: There is a common theme in them all. Societies have become addicted to repetitions and repetitive experiences, essentially to hypnosis.

Is it still the dream of so many with so little information the experience of thereof? Surely it seems to erode as the world develops into a village, as spoken of by many modern thinkers of varying degrees of popularity. One would think the desire to see the world would tenfold upon the realization that there are so many corners of the earth discovered by people. If it weren't for the addiction to hypnosis and vicarious experience, this would certainly be the norm.

"Vicarious experience?" I do say so to myself, wondering if I myself even know what I mean and if I should recon this entire piece of idiot writing.

What I mean by a vicarious experience; Slavoj Zizek, as troubled as he makes me feel, said it best in his Npro lecture titled "Living in the end times, according to Slavoj Zizek": 

"...Canned laughter on TV. When laughter is a part of the soundtrack itself, a very strange thing happens... Even if I don't laugh, the TV set laughs for me; At the end I am relieved, as if I have laughed... Here we have emotions, an emotional discharge, but it doesn't happen to me."

This, I feel, donates generously to what I mean about a "vicarious experience".  Let's plays, reality shows, radio interviews, simulation games, livestreaming, all experiences in which you experience something through another person experiencing it. Almost as if millions are satisfied with the idea that an experience has been, even if it has not been had by them. If an experience is achieved and broadcasted, then it is the experience of everyone. Yet, it is not even the experience now of the person who actualized the physical knowledge required to experience that moment in time in a way that can be considered, truly, an "experience" as we think of it. 

The vicarious experience, now used to satiate the human curiosity in many, opens that mind to altering. The mind is opened to altering because one of the major fundamentals of an independent existence is inhibited or completely destroyed; The desire for experience through one's own senses. We're satisfied with experiencing vicariously, therefore we are far less likely to wish to control the other aspects of our human experience because we are so adjusted to experiencing vicariously which is an experience through someone else. The love of law is a vicarious experience, you gain value through an experience meant to protect the State in which you live, but not your physical state, and it causes the fiscal and lawful aspects of our lives to be controlled by another party that is not us and provides for us another vicarious experience.

The vicarious experience, in it's most fundamental state, has most likely existed since the birth of oral speech. Experience in general and especially experiencing vicariously as an aspect of altering the consciousness of masses is a relatively new idea. The idea of altering mass amounts of people in a way that could be associated with "brainwashing" as a social concept may be no older than two-thousand years. You know what else is about two-thousand years old? The bible. I honestly find that interesting, since the Indo-European vision of holy word has been softly edited in the name of political virtue for some many, many years. Religion itself is not the problem, just as things such as mind manipulation is not the problem. It's not the hypnotism, it's the allegiance of the hypnotist.

Everyone wants to be angry at the hammer for hurting their hand, and not their own foolishness for getting themselves or others hurt. Hypnotism is not the trouble, it's those who use the power unwisely. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. So on, and so forth. I am reading a book about the medium being the true experience, not the content. However, we are entirely convinced that the content is the only thing to be seen and therefore conditionally altered. So if the feelings of a shooter is the content of a shooting event, then the gun is the medium. However, we are only focused on the content, and not what facilities the existence of the medium as a muse of violent content. As long as we shun the medium in coexistence with the content, we will not have full experiences or even an understanding of them. This is strained further by the vicarious experience.

Would you like a drawing of a puppy? I know you would totally dig that, especially at this point in the reading. The idea that none of your experiences are your own, or very little of them are truly your own as traditionally defined ones, is sad. So here's that dog.

we are playing in echoes and there may be no way out

The title sounds frightening, but I feel it may be true. In whatever organ contains my philosophical heart, I am concerned. No one shares my concern.

We are playing in echoes, proverbally psychic feedback loops. 

Since Greco-Roman times, an obsession with cycles has blossomed into a bouquet of flowers that give vent to peal upon peal of circular experience and has caused humanity to desire a life lived as a cycle. From the ritual to the process, the control of the narrative echo is being derailed as it frays; It is as if the repetition of old philosophies and psychological functions has worn thin like an old silk cloth. 

This is causing irreversible psychic trauma on the entire world, and no one can figure out how to end it. Everyone seems to be very smitten with the hypnotic social engineering they've been enduring for so long. The needless abuse of the people when better systems either exist or can be made to exist with adequate focus. That isn't the point though, that previously mentioned topic deserves it's own time. This need to control a narrative to favor a group is permanently damaging our universe as we perceive it.

I am praying for Bashar al-Assad this night, and I am praying for the people most affected by the onslaught of vice that we are experiencing. My mind is deeply engraved with the events that are almost carbon copies of what is happening in Syria at this moment. All of the Western excursions of the Middle East, Africa and the Americas that seem ever so slightly familiar in hindsight are all linked to the same game that has been played since Greco-Roman philosophers put the idea into language to be passed down through time.

The philosophies of the Greeks and Romans are a very lucky system of process, and rely on a series of process that insist on degradation. Greco-Roman philosophy always insists on it's own destruction and inferiority, on it's inevitability of becoming an expired sense of thought. Yet, we treat these philosophies as timeless, relying on them for our ideas of our own mind while treating them as ideas once expired. This paradox of perception causes the cultural echo, a reverberation and therefore degradation of the same or similar.

To this day, without us knowing, the illusion is just sloppy enough for a few folks to understand the game being played. That, ultimately, we are reliving the echo with decreasing power every generation. Everything becomes more extreme, more distorted, only to fade suddenly leaving only the sensation it's pulse left when it rushed you. By the time it fades, the next pulse is initiated and the echo sequence begins again. With each repetition of the same sound, the ripple increases in size but decreases in quality. This describes, in my mind, the cyclical nurturing our societies have endured since the beginning of Catholic Imperialism. If our culture expresses ourselves as, first, an echo of increasing quality that peaks at some point, only to begin experiencing repetition-levied degradation into the cosmos.

These folks do not want to let go of the habit. That goes for consumers and elites. At this point we all echo the things we hold closest, even if they are the worst things for you. We're trapped in the comforting essence of the one-and-the-same and our only visionaries are bound by the feral needs of this global economy. We are drowning.

Everything happening now is a rehash of yesterday, we are playing in echoes and there may be no way out.

repetition as magic: the power of good and evil actions

Is anyone actually a good or bad person? 

Yes, this does mean, in a way, comparing yourself to Hitler. I feel as if everyone does that automatically when thinking of what aspects make someone morally evil or just and whether that particular person is capable of change. He seems to epitomize the worst of the worst in our minds, though far more eccentric crimes do exist in the world (and we all know that). I do ask you, though, for a moment, to consider this and to consider the question beneath it: What makes one a doer of good, and what makes one a doer of evil? 

Consider with me, a moment, the idea of an action. An action can be considered a way of describing one's personhood, one's reflection of their fellow man, a wish, or a sense of will. An action can be ascribed to a lot of things, and is a form of execution. I'd go so far as to call it a sort of magic: A thing that comes from that which is imaginary, or, removed from the realm we can universally perceive. 

So, now that we have action established as a form of magic: Could we go so far as to say that the perpetuation of a particular magic is the only thing that can truly gesture outwardly to someone being of harmful or disadvantageous (bad) nature? Could we say, even, that the perpetuation of action is the only thing that truly makes someone bad or good? 

The thought is the target in an era of information, an era of unrealized potential. It begs the question, naturally: Do certain thoughts make someone bad or good? 

In my humble opinion: Yes and/or no. This is a grey area mercy to the subjectivity of moral and whether the topic ever sees the light of day. Someone can have racialized thoughts, but if you never know, does it affect you? There are many who would say no, and in some instances I agree. This is, though, a dangerous presumption to take into our scientific era. It has been proven that emotional dispositions can be woven into DNA, including an inclination towards dynamics created by man (such as racialism and misogyny). 

My conclusion is as follows: An individual is only as bad as the repetition of magic dictates. Their knowledge of the action is not always required in order to validate the badness/goodness of the act but outside knowledge is not always an indicator of an unjust action. The magic bends to your will, bends to your sense of intelligence, your sense of good, bad, and truth. Like an echo in a brilliant cave, your actions are naturally inclined to loop and shape your personhood.

In ages of extremism, the ponderance of such magics is crucial to making positive and socially enriching choices for both yourself and your fellow human being. Truth reveals the reality of good and evil, and how they are a matter of your actions and thoughts. Seek the truth, and you will never be confined to being a "bad" or "good" person, since at one point we all are and may be right now.

At one point, Adolf Hitler was a good person and, perhaps, even a likable person. Just as you, at one point, have been or will be to someone an unlikable person. 

Flexibility in this world will always decide what makes you good or bad.

between matrixes: all consuming silence

I cannot help but get the feeling, after all this excitement, that even very assured people are feeling weightless. Not a good, freedom-bringing weightlessness either; no, it's more of a wayward vacancy of information blindness. The American public, and world audiences second-handedly involved, feel caught between two matrixes. One group expected an inevitable movement of the status-quo, the other had no expectations whatsoever. Both groups are simultaneously jarred by both the very act of a decision being made, and what that decision was. For countless, including myself, a very different outcome was anticipated. Regardless, we all find ourselves in a void between two gauche concepts of reality. We're stuck in a spiritual elevator, waiting on the fire department.

To say that this is simply the elites "switching hands" seems far too easy, and almost seems a defeatist's argument. "No matter what, the puppet masters always have control..." There are, for me, some fundamental international ties that are speaking in a way that imply an unsuredness amongst their US involved elites. No one is actually sure what a Trump term will bring, especially after he is properly informed about how all the stuff works. The illusion of him being an outsider is more like a translucent screen: Surely he's not a dope, but he's not Warren Buffet either. In fact, a majority of this election has been woven together for our viewing pleasure via half truths and white lies. This just seems too obvious for people who have this sort of stuff planned decades in advanced, this as in "Using populism and manufactured unrest to get people to vote for the puppet".

 Here's where even clever people fall short: We expected this to be a bid for globalism. Populism and nationalism tend not to fair globalists unless it is a bid to isolate and control a nation and keep it away from the rest of the world (Ukraine?). Unless they plan to move the Western strong-arm power elsewhere this quickly, there is no real reason to turn America into a Populist driven state. This is really not making sense, unless there was a rebellion within the electoral festivities. If the narrative of an FBI rebellion proves to have any merit, this could tell us what happened in there. If this is not the case, then, perhaps, the puppet masters truly did simply change the hand they use to act. After all, they could always kill Trump, install Pence, and pardon Obama/the Clintons and everyone would be happy. We'll see.

I shrink into my two-sizes-too big sweatshirt, like a turtle, and just like may others simply wait to see what is left when the dust settles.

practicality, persistence: my mission statement

In what feels to be an endless, entrapping dance, winding depictions of impulse, confusion, failure and anxiety cycling around me, I am grabbing blindly for some arm in which to take up against my invisible captors. My panic increases as I engage this drama every single day of my life, my energies being frayed so terribly that i'm afraid I will truly disintegrate into damaged wisps of fabric and become useless forever. I am desperately fumbling for something, anything, to save myself. 

What have I found, you may not be asking? The idea, and birth in my mind, of  persistence, and practicality. 

These seem like no-brainers to some people. For me, I was not so lucky. Born to an unstable, emotional, cluttered and impractical household, there were no rules to existence. No expectations for my future. Nothing but day to day living, hoping the future would yield some sort of bounty. This life, hardly worthy of being called one, is in constant impulsive chaos. Retention of long term goals is zilch, no sense of commitment exists within my DNA. I felt defective, and still do. 

I realized though, that no one is truly just born properly persistent and practical, unless they are some sort of messiah. They are taught these skills. 

When I came to terms with this near universal truth, after reading endless internet comments from people struggling precisely as I am now, I knew I had no choice but to pick up the only weapons in sight: Persistence, and Practicality. 

Wait though, what does it mean to be practical anyway? 

To be practical is to put knowledge and learnings to practice. That's all. When I heard it that way, I felt blown away. I felt that being practical was finally something attainable, although not yet in my grasp. 

How about persistence?

Persistence is the act of perseverance, despite difficult positions, in completing a commitment, activity, or goal. This one holds the biggest learning curve for me to overcome. 

I have chosen to teach myself how to cultivate these two virtues. The anxiety, the fatalism, the impulse, the social atrophy, the aversion to commitment and deep thought, I intend to slay it all with these two beautiful, powerful tools. 

The mastery of persistence is within the very act itself, repeated endlessly. Through this, practicality will shine. Persistence and practicality both welcome routine, and that is where this blog comes into play.

Mission statement: A single topic, a single post, every day or at least every other day. Creative projects will also be parked here. This sanctuary is also a mental training field. I have no choice but to master these weapons, lest I will perish and become bothersome dust in this disgustingly sovereign vision of reality we have been subjected to.