Distinction

Evidence 1: I heard this great story on radiolab the other day. It was about how it is entirely possible that members of ancient cultures, despite the same physical capacity as modern people, could not identify the color blue. Apparently such a distinction had no inherent value for them (no blue food, enemies, art, etc.).

Evidence 2: There was a decade in there when I got really into drawing copies of nature photos (originally my ADD coping strategy for college lectures). One if the discoveries I made, which drastically improved the quality of the drawings was that there are no real lines in nature; that separations are all gradations with various degrees of severity. If you draw harsh lines on the edges of anything, it ceases to look realistic.

Evidence 3: They say babies are born unable to distinguish anything from themselves. The separations that define ”this” and ”that” are not immediately apparent. Gradually, as necessities and interests develop, one thing or another becomes important, and children learn to identify the particular thing. Some learning occurs when a distinction dawns on a person, and previously fluid concepts become discrete, at which point new conceptual manipulations become possible.

Conclusion/hypothesis: Separations are artificial constructs of the human mind. We (everything) are all one, maybe.

If this is true, then what of those elegant manipulations? Are they commonly accepted because they reflect some objective reality, or merely because we develop in a shared society, with reference frames overlapping?

Contributing member of society

I had begun to lose faith in humanity.   

Having spent some weeks frequenting an urban hospital that serves a diverse population, I had encountered a shocking number of people who function on an astoundingly low level. I've always argued that very few people are utterly hopeless. I've had numerous debates with conservative friends and family wherein I take the side of those whose livelihood depends on social safety nets (don't we all rely on the security inherent to our social contract to some degree?). But over the past month it started to dawn on me that there is a pretty substantial population of legitimately dependent, utterly un-self-aware people in this country, simply going through the motions, however distasteful, however physically uncomfortable.

I wondered:
Is this a local phenomenon?
Is this a recent thing?
Have there always been large chucks of society that are essentially on autopilot?

A few thoughts emerged from some discussion and pondering. Initially, it didn't seem possible that this has always been the case, as we have been through some tough times as a species, and I'm sure we didn't, and couldn't, lug around such dead weight through that. So did this just crop up, or is it instead a new manifestation of something that has been around but maybe not an issue in the past, when environmental/social circumstances would have provided a productive outlet for these tendencies?

Maybe, I wondered, freeing most people from the burden of decision-making is adaptive in the long run? Maybe that human ballast functions as a keel at times, rather than our modern result: dragging anchor-like.

I like that explanation. So I'll run with it for a bit...

The problem, then, is that the default actions of the choiceless many are only recently dysfunctional. The unstated barking orders of our modern times are destructive; the culture/paradigm of the impoverished among us is polluted with toxic expectations and norms.

I have seen the other end of the spectrum, where folks are brought into a high functioning culture. It would be easy to attribute their functionality to good breeding, but the same proportion of adherents exist there, only they adhere to policies and practices that work better, and their families work hard to ensure that this is so. They live in "bubbles" of high-functioning humanity, buffeted against the din of the dominant American paradigm.

And here I'm unfairly casting, as nearly all people (myself included) exhibit the behavior patterns I'm referring to as ”adherence,” as opposed to independent decision-making. Truth is, the analysis required to thoughtfully make choices is taxing. Perpetually questioning the paradigm is exhausting. So it is that we all benefit from immersion into a functioning culture that sets default settings which keep us healthy and well.


Let the goal be to immerse our people in cultural habits that promote health, opportunity, and happiness. Let us enrich our world and provide fall-back protocols that carry us through trying times. May we fold more of the masses into the security and empowerment of well-being.

Grass-roots can only grow in reasonably rich soil. Let's rid ourselves of the toxic...