Thread for mundane ironists

David Lynch

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

His movies, for example.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.

Of course, your “after a while” might be different.

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force–a wild pain and decay–also accompanies everything.

So far, anyway.

My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.

That settles that, right?

I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.

If only from the cradle to the grave.

There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

Let’s make it safe to think here.

Thinking can be like that here, sure. Not many places that isn’t true, if you’re avoiding following the evidence where it leads like it’s the plague.

Jules Feiffer

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

And now, Jules?

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary.

He had a few dimes, I suspect.

She’s always been crazy about me but I don’t know - I never thought she was very much. But I see the way guys look at her on the street so I guess she must have a pretty great figure. And I see how people gather around her at parties so I guess she must have a really great personality. And I see how hard everybody listens when she talks so I guess she must be extremely intelligent. So I guess I’m in love with her. And I guess I’ll marry her. And I’ll guess we’ll be very happy. Sounds like a good deal.

Someone run this by…Maia? 8)

Satire doesn’t stand a chance against reality anymore.

Someone run this by…the Donald?

When I was little, I listened to radio serials, read comic books and went to ‘B’ movies. When I got a little older I listened to big band swing, read slick magazines and went to ‘A’ movies. When I got even older I listened to F-M stereo, read literary quarterlies and went to foreign movies. And then the pop-culture movement began. Now I listen to old radio serials, read comic books and go to revivals of ‘B’ movies. In a society without standards who needs to grow up?

Let’s pin down “the standards” here.
While we still can?

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I’m normal.

Late-capitalism, let’s call it.

First, let me state to you, Alfred, and to you, Patricia, that of the 200 marriages that I have performed, all but seven have failed. So the odds are not good. We don’t like to admit it, especially at the wedding ceremony, but it’s in the back of all our minds, isn’t it? How long will it last? We all think that, don’t we? We don’t like to bring it out in the open, but we all think that. Well, I say, why not bring it out in the open? Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won’t put any of these reasons down. Each in its own way is adequate. Each is all right. Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating. Please, don’t be startled. I’m not putting him down. That marriage did not work. But the man tried. He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society’s way. So, you see, it was not a mistake. It turned out all right. Now, just last month, I married a novelist to a painter. Everyone at the wedding ceremony was under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. The drug quickened our mental responses, slowed our physical responses, and the whole ceremony took two days to perform. Never have the words had such meaning. Now, that marriage should last. Still, if it does not, well, that’ll be all right. For don’t you see, any step that one takes is useful, is positive, has to be positive because it’s a part of life. Even the negation of the previously taken step is positive. That too is a part of life. And in this light, and only in this light, should marriage be viewed as a small, single step. If it works, fine. If it fails, fine. Look elsewhere for satisfaction. To more marriages, fine. As many as one wants, fine. To homosexuality? Fine. To drug addiction? I will not put it down. Each of these is an answer for somebody.

And the good news [of course] is that none of what we believe about any of this need go much beyond merely believing it itself.

Melissa Broder

I’m in love with you and you don’t want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story.

Repeat as necessary.

Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.

Click, let’s say.

I’m always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.

And how ironic is that?

Let’s pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.

To wit:
“She coulda turned out to be almost anyone
Almost anyone
With the possible exception
Of who I wanted her to be”

For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet you anxiety.

And if it doesn’t?

How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.”

She means “meh” of course.

Jordan Peterson

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

See, I told you.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.

See, you told me.

Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.

Hell, most here will never tolerate my own truths. Unfortunately, however, I’m still not one of them.

Always place your becoming above your current being.

Right, like that will always be an option.

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.

Or nothing better.

If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue then you’re constantly a good person with a minimum of effort.

No politics please.

Eugène Ionesco

A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

Next up: a reader.

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

And how many times have I scolded you about that?

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

Just out of curiosity, why do so many of them end up here?

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me

You know, being optimistic.

What’s chivalrous about saying you’ve seen a rhinoceros?

Besides, how absurd is that?

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.

And what might that be?

R.D. Laing

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing “the facts”. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the “evidence”.

Wow, I’ll bet that reminds you of…me?

One may see his behaviour as ‘signs’ of a ‘disease’; one may see his behaviour as expressive of his existence. The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting […] The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’, may propose to confine himself to the ‘objectively’ observable behaviour of the patient before him. The simplest reply to this is that it is impossible. To see ‘signs’ of ‘disease’ is not to see neutrally. Nor is it neutral to see a smile as contractions of the circumoral muscles.

Common sense, let’s call it.

“I am not fond of the word psychological.
There is no such thing as the psychological.
Let us say that one can improve the biography of
the person." Jean-paul Sartre

Click, of course.

It seems also that the preferred method of attack on the other is based on the same principle as the attack felt to be implicit in the other’s relationship to oneself. Thus, the man who is frightened of his own subjectivity being swamped, impinged upon, or congealed by the other is frequently to be found attempting to swamp, to impinge upon, or to kill the other person’s subjectivity.

Never works for me. At least not that I’m actually aware of.

This writing is not exempt. It remains like all writing an absurd and revolting effort to make an impression on a world that will remain as unmoved as it is avid. If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know.

Does virtually count?

The family’s function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence; to believe in God, not to experience the Void; to create, in short, one-dimensional man; to promote respect, conformity, obedience. . .

Start here: The Irrational in Politics: Brinton, Maurice: 9780961328962: Amazon.com: Books

Thomas Nagel from Mind & Cosmos

It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps.

Next up: the gaps here.

The question is there, whether we answer it or not.

Let’s think of one.

I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.

Or here [theoretically] philosophy.

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.

The agony and the ecstasy, for example.

Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.

How about we split the difference. If that’s even possible,

The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.

Hmm. So, there must be a God?

Death

“How unhappy does one have to be before living seems worse than dying?” Deborah Curtis

Start here: https://youtu.be/p15-hIIACvY?si=kjMx43cQZLejE2NT

And I could have died right then. And considering how things went, I really should have.” Ned Vizzini

Then repeat as necessary.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Either that or up in smoke.

He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn’t happen to you every year.” Terry Pratchett

Right, like that would make it even worse

“If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.” Ian McEwan

Metaphorically as it were.

“Because no one needs to live forever. I think that sometimes you can outstay your welcome." Gemma Malley

Then this part: you want to live forever.

David Lynch

Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way.

Start here: https://youtu.be/yKdztrUft-c?si=fkPOwUUMIW3nb9rk

Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.

Of course?

Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new.

And now, David?

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It’s better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it’s a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

Cue Fred Madison.

There’s always fear of the unknown where there’s mystery.

Pick two:
1] life
2] death

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way the really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it … I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime, there’s suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it’s people kind of going in circles. It’s fantastic. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain.

Next up: a lot of pain. Period.

Donald D. Hoffman

This critique also misreads the Copernican revolution. Yes, our perceptions misled us about our place in the universe. But its deeper message is this: our perceptions can mislead us about the very nature of the universe itself. We are prone to falsely believe that certain limitations and idiosyncrasies of our perceptions are genuine insights into objective reality.

Right, the very nature of the universe itself. Cue, among other things, lots and lot of clouds.

…as Einstein put it ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live."

Does anyone here really understand the manner in which this distinction plays out “for all practical purposes” given the actual behaviors they choose?

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.

Same thing? If you concur, please note how it plays out existentially in your interactions with others.

There are as many cubes as there are observers constructing cubes. And when you look away, your cube ceases to be.

Ice cubes? Skewb cubes? Rubik’s cubes? Dice?

Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated".

Click, of course.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

Let alone commune with correctness theoretically.

Yuval Noah Harari

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little…

Imagine that.

History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes.

This part: https://youtu.be/eQj4e6VCL0w?si=VyEopgv_XPHYGKZM

The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’

Yet we still post here day after day.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

Next up: bounded by philosophy.

Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify.

Bummer.

Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights.

New thread?

Marshall McLuhan

I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.

I know what he means. And then some.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

If you get his drift, say?

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!

You tell me. Unless you prefer me to tell you.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

And whose insights and understandings might that be?

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot…for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

Huh? As though if you can’t see something it doesn’t exist?

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.

That might explain Trump as much as anything else does.

Melissa Broder

I would say I’m less afraid of dying than I am of life.

On the other hand, she’s still around. And then some: Melissa Broder - Wikipedia

Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?

Yes.

What I wanted most was for this certified hot person to see a hotness in me, thereby verifying, once and for all, that I was hot.

So, is she: melissa broder - Google Search

They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn’t like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.

The more less the better?

We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head: a love story.

She’s got a million of them.

What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness – to transcend myself and my human imperfections – but this has yet to happen.

That ever happen to you?

R.D. Laing

If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well that the leader knows he is.

Let’s run this by Elon Trump.

How dare you have fun when Christ died on the cross for you! Was he having fun?

Knot that I know of.

The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the ‘personality’, false self, mask, ‘front’, or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive ‘personality’ of its own.

Fractured and fragmented as it were.

Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These “mechanisms” are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that “splitting”, for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such “defenses” by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.

Human psychology…don’t leave home without it.

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

Right, a strategy.

Many people used to believe that angels moved the stars. It now appears that they do not. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in angels. Many people used to believe that the ‘seat’ of the soul was somewhere in the brain. Since brains began to be opened up frequently, no one has seen ‘the soul’. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in the soul. Who could suppose that angels move the stars, or be so superstitious as to suppose that because one cannot see one’s soul at the end of a microscope it does not exist?

I’ll help you find yours if you’ll help me find mine.

Still?

There is only one who is always already whole.

Thomas Nagel

Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.

The Gap? Rummy’s Rule? The Benjamin Button Syndrome? Forget about them…

One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge. It may be frustrating to acknowledge, but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought at which we find ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries and develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt.

See, I told you.

Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.

See, I told you.

It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.

All the way back to God, let’s say?

The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position. … Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.

More trivial pursuits, right?

Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.

Thank god for assumptions!

Integrity

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words." Roy T. Bennett

What, no context?

“I prefer to surround myself with people who reveal their imperfection, rather than people who fake their perfection.” Charles F. Glassman

Like we can always tell the difference.

“Each mind conceives God in its own way. There may be as many variation of the God figure as there are people in the world” Bangambiki Habyarimana

I would never go that far myself. On the other hand, could I?

“Healthy resilience comes from a place of integrity, and it’s allowing ourselves to feel and to genuinely be who we want to be and to show up how we want to in this world.” Keisha Blair

Let’s run that be, among others, iambiguous.

“Once you compromise your integrity, you make it easier to give in to temptation the next time.” Frank Sonnenberg

I would hope so in this world.

“We deny truth when it becomes an inconvenience.” Allene vanOirschot

And, of course, here, practice makes perfect.

David Lynch

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.

What, not even virtually?

The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish—a fragment of an idea—that fish will draw in other fish, and they’ll hook onto it. Then you’re on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.

Next up: going fishing here.
And, no, not just for those godawful objectivists.

In a Town like Twin Peaks noone is innocent.

Anyone innocent here? As opposed to, say, not guilty?

The house is a place where things can go wrong.

Would you believe in some houses more so than others?

Within your own self is a treasury, an ocean of pure bliss, consciousness, intelligence, creativity, love, happiness, energy, and peace… within every human being. Experience that and you will begin to know yourself, which is unbounded, eternal totality.

You find mine, I’ll find yours.

Inside, we are ageless…and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.

And now, David?