Terrible Years of Quiet Greatness: Logic, Feelings, and New Thought Process
- Jonathan Rodriguez
- Apr 5, 2025
- 9 min read
[Originally Posted: 30 Nov 2024]
(The News - a reporting of what has transpired quietly and internally.)
logic
The "Law of the Excluded Middle". This turns out not to be a real Law in any absolute sense, but rather, a Choice. You can decide to bind or invoke it, or decide not to; but either way, you then must deal with the consequences of whatever follows it.
Real-world rule often functions in the same way. There are those practices for which we have collectively formed an absolute agreement, and then those rules that are only enforceable in a specific jurisdiction -- predicated on those standards and practices that have been agreed upon among a set of people. This set of people is often (or, I should say, has often been) associated with a particular piece of land, a geographical area, a "place". This seems to me what mathematicians mean when they talk about a place, or "where such-and-such is true"; the truth of something in an area is based on the predication of what has preceded it.
I have often been stymied in the past while trying to discern the "predecessors" of a certain field, almost as if the truth of what came before the present state of the art that I see before me has been hidden, or perhaps turned away from. Is the past of the thing that you're interested in truly that hard to look at or talk about?
But in science, the inquiry into cause is impossible to ignore. If you're looking at an effect, and not asking about cause, you're not doing science. You're doing something else.
Finding something uncomfortable to look at is not a passable excuse in science. (I observed this problem with reference to a certain "Coexist" banner that certain academics didn't want to see hanging there. What kind of intellectual vacuum were they proposing to function in? It peaked my interest.)
This links to how we feel about what we're studying and what we're looking at -- in the practice of Computer Science that I have observed, the direction chosen for research and freeform practice alike can, and often is, decided by how we're feeling about the topic, its attractions and uses. At least in C.S., the "passive observer" has died. (Good riddance to the Chicken of C.S.)
feelings
I've been surrounded by people who love positive feelings.
But if you don't have positive feelings, how do you get them? Are you looking for someone to supply them? But if you want them, there is a cost that must be borne, socially, collectively. There are: Negative Feelings. I'd like to list here the negative feelings that I absorbed and carried for a few years, and then worked my way out of. Almost as if I was paying a debt.
FEAR. There was this sense that I began to have that I was being observed. I pricked my ears and set up an internal and psychological guard, for I was unsure about the origin of these changes in what I was perceiving, and I wanted to be sure that what I thought was true about what I was perceiving and conjecturing had at least some observable evidence that I could point to and say, "There's definitely something going on there," and was not a descent into some unverifiable fantasy.
There seemed to be something undismissable going on, that something that I had said or done had been noticed by someone who had a social or political or religious power of some unknown extent. There were people in my workplace who began to say things that sounded remarkably similar to things that I had said or written years or months or weeks prior, and I could not explain that. It was almost as if I had become famous in some way, but I could not explain how, or by what means such a thing was occurring. There were also certain things that I began to notice on my phone and in spam emails that seemed strangely-worded and suspicious, in their tenor, or timing, or content, any one of which could just be chance, but in aggregate and collectively amounted to undismissable evidence of something strange and unexpected happening. I could not rule out a brain dysfunction of some kind, as I was in that situation in a foreign-feeling city and under a considerable level of "normal" stress, so in that sense, everything could yet be ordinary; but in the spirit of science and curiosity, I refused to concede to a "normal" that had not justified itself. This could potentially be new knowledge leading to a critical point of view that my brain at a deep level had just never before considered, so I was determined to let the course of this proceed unless I had a truly justifiable reason to shut it off.
VERY SPECIAL, UNEXPLAINED. As things proceeded, I began to notice that there were pieces that started to reflect what I thought of as my own individual style of thought showing up in casual searches and recommendations on the Internet. Not ads -- I know enough about how that works to consider algorithmic "following" of advertisements to explain nothing in and of itself, and I have often used ad blockers and don't shop around a lot on the Internet anyway -- but rather certain "styles" of thought or philosophy that I had previously thought of as my own, and rather despaired of getting "out there" were starting to show up written by other people.
And then I began to hear Boris Johnson saying things about Brexit and autonomy that seemed quite like the thoughts I had written about several years prior, and I immediately began to to wonder: How did that reach him?
It seemed that I had become famous, or at least noticed, somehow, by people in high-level positions of power. But if this were truly the case, if I was really being talked about by many people, then why would no-one speak to me directly? And if this were not the case, then how did this stuff get out there?
GOD OR POLITICIAN: PRESSURE. With respect to fear and fame, does that matter in its effect on the brain? Having previously had little to no interest in politics (although there is a type of pursuit of "greatness" that can tilt in that direction, under certain conditions), and really more interested in the "quiet life", what was I to make of the extent to which I was seemingly under the power of some political nature, which I seemed completely out of my element to participate in? If this was, somehow, a sense of God or other great spiritual power that I was perceiving in that moment, or some unholy combination of political and spiritual authority, I felt the best thing I could do was to simply watch it until such a time as I could come to some determination as to what this was, and whether it was good or evil, and in what ways. This was also Edward Snowden territory, in which there was a book titled, Naked Before Power. And I thought, regardless of which thing this is that I seem to be involved with, that's an apt description of a segment of what I was feeling there.
HATRED. With the sense of "fame" there was also this thought that I was hated by some while desired greatly by others. I decided this wasn't a problem, at least in and of itself. So this sense of hating and being hated was something that I was able to kind of move through, since I neither desired nor especially feared the feeling of hatred. It just kind of was.
PAIN. There was a deadly-feeling combination of mental pain and depression that I had begun to experience to some degree after the housing market crash in 2008. I wasn't dead, I was just carrying that. For 16 years. And it reached a peak in 2019, just before COVID hit, and it would not leave. Enough pain to risk critical dysfunction at work. Pain to constantly interrupt a sane thought process. Enough pain to thrust you into a God-mode yet isolated fantasy head space, where the world just moves to meet your every whim. Or doesn't. Pain to split apart the very thought processes that used to talk to each other, and now no longer communicate the same way, if at all. Pain to remake the very function of your brain.
BOUNDARIES. You're not getting my children. When whatever this was started going after my children, that's when I, in rage, began to push it away. I saw nothing there that is even remotely worth that kind of sacrifice. Others may disagree with me on this point (they believe their "cause" to be worth the life of their children), but I decided I'm not with them on that. They're free to go do that, but it won't be with me. Here's the problem: There are also those who will want you make some kind of sacrifice of yourself essentially so they can continue partying; and even worse, they then try to get those who have sacrificed to stay silent about that. Not interested; this is real evil.
RAGE. Sooo delicious, the rage. Unlike many of these other feelings, this one actually feels good. Why? For there to be mercy, there must be justice. For there to be justice, there must exist a rage, a vengeance against that which is unjust. One of my main decisions here is that I wanted to prevent the destruction of what I love and what I want to keep when the rage goes through. So it's exploratory; I want to be sure of these matters before the inevitable raging backlash rips through everything that I do not desire.
Yeah, I came back.
movies and streams
Sometimes it is possible to see confirmation or opposition to what you're thinking and feeling about these things in shows and movies. What's the truth-validity of this? It's at least this much: People have produced these movies in response to certain influences, and they use this medium to speak or broadcast something to others. We do a horrible disservice to truth when we dismiss the whole as "fiction" simply because we have found some portion of it to be fabricated.
A couple of movies that have recently held or reflected explanatory power for me:
Alien (1979). In retrospect, when going after 20,000 of something, maybe bring more than 7 people. Like 8 or 9 or 10. A pivotal scene for me in the rewatching of that movie was the "birth" scene of the alien. It suddenly dawned on me: That's a baby! It's utterly terrifying, and it's trying to kill them, and there's so much blood. The plot only "ends" when the exhausted woman succeeds in putting on a space suit (labelled D-7, notably), flushes the alien out into the void of space, and falls asleep for the long return trip to Earth. In observing the "community" those astronauts had at the start of the movie, in addition to these other things, I'm just thinking, "circumstances of my birth". Weird, huh? But psychologically and culturally explanatory, nonetheless. I then watched the 2017 film, and it was awful in a bad way. So much (from my newfound perspective) s--t I could barely make out what the real content of the story (if anything) actually was -- it was so wildly off the mark. Alien: Romulus (2024) -- far better. We're very clearly flushing something down the toilet there, but it's not this baby.
Lawnmower Man (1992). Game engines, red engines, Virtual Reality. Now that I've got some ability to read what's being communicated there (that was a real problem before), I find myself thinking, In this man's hyper-velocity trajectory into absolute isolation, erasure of all boundaries, and utter loss of everything that once made him human, where would I have stepped off?
ONE SERIES THAT LATCHED ONTO ME THAT I WAS COMPLETELY SURPRISED BY: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). In this series, the boy must learn to kill the alien "angels" that are threatening to destroy the preferred future of humankind. He must "sync" (become psychologically tuned with) his equipment and thereby become able to penetrate the "Absolute Terror" fields that protect the invading angels. This may be fiction, but the psychological "sync" capacity is real, and we are constantly doing these synchronizations with things and people in the real world. The thought that some of these things could actually leap from the pages or screen of fiction into the real world by means (presumably) of psychological "sync" is an interesting one, but people I would think would have to be psychologically "close" enough in certain ways in order for this transference to occur. And, at least for some people, it does.
Now, if you can see through the weirdness to the actual problem I saw here, the introductory song sets up its premise of attraction: "When the blue wind knocks at the door of your heart ... The cruel angel's thesis: One day, you'll take off through a window, if your overflowing pathos leads you to betray your memories..." This series eventually answers this hypothesis itself: The 17th Angel, when he appears, informs the boy that he's missed a step. Something's gone wrong with his father's attempt to rewrite history.
The draw here, is, of course, greatness. But it is, of course, misordered here. There are good ways and bad ways by which we may draw closer to one another, and if the premise that you have built on is found to be fatally flawed and uncorrectable, then anything that depends on that premise holding true will be swept away.
cross
THAT OLD RUGGED CROSS - FOR THE THINGS WE WENT ALL-IN ON:
SAVE YOUR PROGRESS.
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