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Reading aimlessly and without significant discrimination during my recent illness I ran into a retooling of Rowling's House system into a surprisingly functional division of personalities by ideals and behaviours.
I learned something remarkable I hadn't ever considered. I'm not just adept at spotting patterns; my self doesn't doesn't just grasp at data due to a wash of dopamine alone on the chemical level - in other words my artist's pareidolia and mythopoeic perceptual eye aren't working entirely in isolation from my desires. The interaction is there with serotonin. I seek patterns, or perhaps I should say I await them; I'm rather more skeptical inherently than I suspect many people to be, both innately and through the self-distrust which is the predictable hallmark of abuse, and so I don't accept such patterns without question, but I desire them, quietly, an animal's generalized curiosity about the environment and also an animal's directed appetite to discover something useful not already known.
I rely heavily on intuition in regular function, but my intuition seeks patterns likewise. I take emotional comfort in flowing through the pattern myself, in other things flowing through the pattern, in knowing the flow: this strikes me as neurodivergent, perhaps. It's not just following a script, it's something more like a search for a priori truth.
Then, a few days ago, an interaction with a friend forced me to confront a few questions I didn't realize I hadn't resolved around my own value system.
The desire to abdicate power is one I rarely indulge and generally have a distaste for; it seems to me that in most instances power - am I saying privilege? - implies office and something of an obligation to exercise it judiciously and for the benefit of others - I'd been meaning to write on ba'al tashchit and mottainai for some while.
But the desire to abjure truth, for almost any cause, is abhorrent. I read it in part as cowardice, a meanness of spirit; in part as negligence which may lead to harm of others; in many instances, part as dereliction of a duty. To say "I do not wish to know" may function as a recusal which is appropriate at times - it is of course possible for business to be not one's own - but more often is a deliberate delineation of one's horizon, a redefinition of reality that does not map to the world which affects others. It is a statement from a standpoint of privilege, where I see often a noblesse oblige. Willful blindness is the mother of much agony.
In this are shades of hypocrisy, too: the choice to be willfully blind in order to permit the intolerable, routinely the morally intolerable. The cognitive dissonance should be excruciating, or so one would think. Routinely there is a declaration that one knows enough to know they wish to know no more - typically this implies a either a belief that one is in certain possession of the same knowledge which they refuse to acknowledge and countenance openly, or a position that doubt is tantamount to innocence of thole.
The great ghast of my childhood was apathy - and in a way, this choice of ignorance, or false simplicity, is apathy as an exit from ambivalence - acceptable only when the ambivalence stems from conditions affecting oneself only, and not others. As all things are connected, one's refusal to bear the weight of the truth most commonly offloads its burden onto the shoulders of another; because it specifically revolves around a refusal or redefinition of shared reality, it typically also functions to deprive another of informed consent in direction of their own life - another grave transgression - and for nothing more than comfort, or convenience, in one's own.
Having discovered the word in my study of Norwegian, I consider it a virtue to forestand.
To understand - to comprehend - is an act of desire by the intellect. It is a labor, but stands as its own reward, the truth being its object. Once attained, it is a stasis.
To forestand is to countenance: to stand before the truth as an agent upon you. It is an act of will, an ongoing choice; forestanding is never irrevocably attained, but must be chosen again and again. It never gets easier; rather, the will strengthens. Failure to forestand is a weakness of mind and spirit and will. Failure to forestand is failure to grow strong: that which does not grow, dies. Only in the honesty born of forestanding can consent be freely made: yours and others'.
The most common framing in our current culture of this same virtue paints an opposite image: one of yielding acceptance, rooted in a greater ideal of self-abnegation, an Eastern (or modern Indo-European?) idea which clashes rather sharply with my own moral aesthetic (which I suspect bears greater resemblance to older ideas from the proto-Indo-European period.) Rather than selfhood as a delusion, or supraordination, we once held our identity as a simple, and small, and fragile animal at home between earth and sea and sky. We see the world reflexively, through our own prism; we see ourselves as we see the world. Rather than something separable to be conquered, or mastered, or worked over into utility, as our relationship with the environment would one day become under agriculture, we beheld an integrated system, a pattern of selfhood, to which we were native, into which we grew quite naturally.
One does not kneel before the divine; that would be hierarchy. The holy is as oneself, an agent to be encountered, acknowledged, hailed - this a word with so many shades of meaning in its cousins: greeted, called, apprehended, altogether, healthy, whole.
One stands, and bows, and never takes one's eyes from the face of the sacred thou.
I learned something remarkable I hadn't ever considered. I'm not just adept at spotting patterns; my self doesn't doesn't just grasp at data due to a wash of dopamine alone on the chemical level - in other words my artist's pareidolia and mythopoeic perceptual eye aren't working entirely in isolation from my desires. The interaction is there with serotonin. I seek patterns, or perhaps I should say I await them; I'm rather more skeptical inherently than I suspect many people to be, both innately and through the self-distrust which is the predictable hallmark of abuse, and so I don't accept such patterns without question, but I desire them, quietly, an animal's generalized curiosity about the environment and also an animal's directed appetite to discover something useful not already known.
I rely heavily on intuition in regular function, but my intuition seeks patterns likewise. I take emotional comfort in flowing through the pattern myself, in other things flowing through the pattern, in knowing the flow: this strikes me as neurodivergent, perhaps. It's not just following a script, it's something more like a search for a priori truth.
Then, a few days ago, an interaction with a friend forced me to confront a few questions I didn't realize I hadn't resolved around my own value system.
The desire to abdicate power is one I rarely indulge and generally have a distaste for; it seems to me that in most instances power - am I saying privilege? - implies office and something of an obligation to exercise it judiciously and for the benefit of others - I'd been meaning to write on ba'al tashchit and mottainai for some while.
But the desire to abjure truth, for almost any cause, is abhorrent. I read it in part as cowardice, a meanness of spirit; in part as negligence which may lead to harm of others; in many instances, part as dereliction of a duty. To say "I do not wish to know" may function as a recusal which is appropriate at times - it is of course possible for business to be not one's own - but more often is a deliberate delineation of one's horizon, a redefinition of reality that does not map to the world which affects others. It is a statement from a standpoint of privilege, where I see often a noblesse oblige. Willful blindness is the mother of much agony.
In this are shades of hypocrisy, too: the choice to be willfully blind in order to permit the intolerable, routinely the morally intolerable. The cognitive dissonance should be excruciating, or so one would think. Routinely there is a declaration that one knows enough to know they wish to know no more - typically this implies a either a belief that one is in certain possession of the same knowledge which they refuse to acknowledge and countenance openly, or a position that doubt is tantamount to innocence of thole.
The great ghast of my childhood was apathy - and in a way, this choice of ignorance, or false simplicity, is apathy as an exit from ambivalence - acceptable only when the ambivalence stems from conditions affecting oneself only, and not others. As all things are connected, one's refusal to bear the weight of the truth most commonly offloads its burden onto the shoulders of another; because it specifically revolves around a refusal or redefinition of shared reality, it typically also functions to deprive another of informed consent in direction of their own life - another grave transgression - and for nothing more than comfort, or convenience, in one's own.
Having discovered the word in my study of Norwegian, I consider it a virtue to forestand.
To understand - to comprehend - is an act of desire by the intellect. It is a labor, but stands as its own reward, the truth being its object. Once attained, it is a stasis.
To forestand is to countenance: to stand before the truth as an agent upon you. It is an act of will, an ongoing choice; forestanding is never irrevocably attained, but must be chosen again and again. It never gets easier; rather, the will strengthens. Failure to forestand is a weakness of mind and spirit and will. Failure to forestand is failure to grow strong: that which does not grow, dies. Only in the honesty born of forestanding can consent be freely made: yours and others'.
The most common framing in our current culture of this same virtue paints an opposite image: one of yielding acceptance, rooted in a greater ideal of self-abnegation, an Eastern (or modern Indo-European?) idea which clashes rather sharply with my own moral aesthetic (which I suspect bears greater resemblance to older ideas from the proto-Indo-European period.) Rather than selfhood as a delusion, or supraordination, we once held our identity as a simple, and small, and fragile animal at home between earth and sea and sky. We see the world reflexively, through our own prism; we see ourselves as we see the world. Rather than something separable to be conquered, or mastered, or worked over into utility, as our relationship with the environment would one day become under agriculture, we beheld an integrated system, a pattern of selfhood, to which we were native, into which we grew quite naturally.
One does not kneel before the divine; that would be hierarchy. The holy is as oneself, an agent to be encountered, acknowledged, hailed - this a word with so many shades of meaning in its cousins: greeted, called, apprehended, altogether, healthy, whole.
One stands, and bows, and never takes one's eyes from the face of the sacred thou.
