Language, a Real Job, History, and I

The Real Thing, However, Is In Our Bodies and Minds

To me, learning (Latin: sciencia, or science) is a joy unto itself. But in industry, learning has been made more complex, as MIT and institutions cast in that same shadow believed it was good to make learning useful. "Useful." So we made ourselves of service, and then also built servers. But what are the limits of that use? Do we accept any order no matter how mindless or abusive? The industrialization of the 19th century was the beginning of something big, but where are its ends? I myself have carried a creative capacity, a capacity for new beginnings, and these were greatly desired by people. But before I could produce a real new beginning, there were a couple of things that had to end. A "real job", as it were (and I didn't see anyone else doing what I thought should be done here, so I figured it was up to me). So I sought to re-seat the philosophy around this, now that Pope Francis, the first non-European Pope in 1272 years, has finished his earthly travels. I don't really care if I'm "Catholic" or not, but as a matter of principle, any philosophical system that passes the test must allow for the existence, and ideally, the presence, of whatever truth and service Catholicism has to offer here. This is first and foremost not about religion, but about knowledge and learning, spirit, and truth. Onward.

Random Distributions and Not Considering Myself a Victim

There is an assumption in statistics that everything (event and perception) is random unless evidenced otherwise. That's how statistics works; it's a measurement of a meaningful signal against a background of presumed noise.

But what does it mean to presume, as a person, that all events that occur are inherently random, or meaningless? What this is is to be a victim of the universe. Now, there are people who are truly victims of one thing or another, and I have never met anyone who has not, at some time or another, been a victim of someone or something. But that's not quite what I'm writing about here. What I'm writing about here is that we have had a bad habit of ruthlessly destroying meaning that has the potential to amount to something, but hasn't been proven yet. Into this void steps conspiracy theories and other things.

Here's the thrust: Loss of essential meaning can produce depression and even suicide. That's the human angle. We require meaning to survive. In the ideological angle, the elimination of all wrong answers is no guarantee that you will ever produce a right answer.

What I must do is, therefore, to hold a field or range of possible connections in a suspension without rendering any judgement (pruning) before it becomes apparent which things I can rely on and which I can't.

Randomness (lack of connection or meaning) in observation is always a presumption, never a conclusion.

Personal Experience and Historical Overlay

The previous section is a justification for the exploration of what I'm about to write next.

Sometimes, the experience of something that happens to you as an individual person is hard to understand without relating it somehow to history, or specifically what people have done and experienced in history.

As a child, I saw history mostly as a collection of random dates and times and peoples' names, so it didn't really stick. It wasn't until my 30s, and especially during the events of 2019, that I began to develop the "long" brain connections that I used to understand my mind in a history-associated way.

What did I experience at that time? Only now am I making full sense of it. And again, the justification for this effort is that my personal experience is related or correlated to historical events in some ways, at least to the extent that both I and those historical actors are human, according to the pattern of what being a human is.

There is a fragmentation of thought that occurs. I looked up "Feudal fragmentation", and what I saw there does match one possible explanation for the mental pain I experienced all through graduate school and afterward. Every nation, I'm fairly convinced, reaches this height of power and unity, after which it fractures into subsets, into shards.

I'm also wondering if the dissociation I experienced is so complete, so total, that what I experienced at first was not shards but perhaps diasporic seeding. It's a possibility.

I was particularly struck by the progression in France from the fall of the Carolingian empire (presumably a European unity; interesting that we also had a Carrol who wrote "Alice in Wonderland" and a Karol who was a Pope) to the subsequent return to unity under Louis XI (which is, presumably, a late-stage national unity). I read that Louis XI was called "the Universal Spider" among other names, in reference to his taste for intrigue and intense diplomacy.

Louis XI is also the founder of the Order of Saint Michael, which was designed to confirm the loyalty of nobles to the king. This move was, as I now see it, a borrowing of church power for temporal purposes (for this was instituted as a Catholic order, and the totality of Catholicism itself can never be fully subjected to a temporal ruler).

It is interesting that a higher order yet was later established by Henry III, the Order of the Holy Spirit. The Order of Saint Michael had, in his view, become dirty. The entities of Saint Michael are understood as angelic, while those of the Holy Spirit are considered of God himself.

It is instantly of a serious and personal matter to invoke the Holy Spirit itself. And by "personal" I mean in the sense that it affects you as a whole person; it only permits you to engage in "business" to the extent that it permits.

Answers and Other Hairs

There was a headline I saw on a self-commemoration book published by the University of Waterloo that read, "In the Spirit of, 'Why Not?'" Once you get past the clownishness of that, there is a serious question there. Why not X, for any given X? It's a request for a reason to be given for every desire that is refused.

I also note that Waterloo is down the street from a Saint Michael's parish church, and its Technology Park land adjoins the "Church in the Woods", which is a Christian Reformed outlet. We're watching you.

There used to be a bear in those woods.

The last statement in the preceding section appears to be tautological, which makes me wonder why it's even there. There is a permission here, and a strict obedience, but we're not saying here the details of what exactly that may entail for you. It has a tautological facet, but it's not empty.

One time, I asked Catholicism what it really was, and the impression I got back was of a couple of short Medieval guys guarding the church door who could have come straight out of the 14th century. So, you know, defended. In comparison, I was as light and ephemeral as a cloud that just passes through them. I wonder how long I've been like that. No, wait, I know a probable answer: 600 years. Long enough to forget that there was really any other way of thinking, long enough for Modernism to seem this weird and foreign language, a language that I had to learn myself over the last some number of years (learning in part by reverse-engineering, inferring from what I heard people saying that didn't make any sense to me when I first started becoming aware of it), a language with powerful and scary and brutal and high ideas and vocabulary that stunned me into an isolated and fearful silence for some years. I didn't understand what was happening. Not at the time. Only that my 14th-century defenses were suddenly and deeply vulnerable to something that I did not predict coming.

It's been a hard, hard road to travel. But now that I've been through it, snapshot. I want to remember, so that we never forget the accommodation of a truly and really different way of thinking.