courageII.md 8.8 KB
Issues of Courage and Fear
It's easy to conjure up a consensus on the presence of issues, often a tragic truth of reality, which can be observed in society, and can begin to be addressed in the present time because of how far we've come. Though these nuanced, sensitive issues should call for a coalition of purveyors of reason and inquiry so that they may scrupulously work through complex issues and ideas with an open mind and sound evaluative process, we grow increasingly aware that they are often represented in their most simple terms, bringing forth an innate susceptibility to make any proposed accord prone to paralyzing degrees of obfuscation, and that they are being championed by actors who are quick to demonstrate a loathsome disdain for ideas which do not immediately proclaim uniformity of thought.
Simplification carries stereotyping. The stereotypes that groups have historically dealt with. Undoing the progress made for one community because of the baseline demand for radical change and disruption has been elevated past the point of examining the nuances upon which our previous progress had fundamentally required.
Previous progress lead to the granting of self determination, especially of note for those who had been most marginalized. This is now replaced with a need to assemble and designate generic enumerates bearing the key politically visible patterns sufficient to affect artificial tallies of justice, where the numbers themselves are the evidence of choice, and the tooling of choice itself is becoming a distant heretical memory.
Brute forcing conversations which demand that viable issues must be interlocked into one simplified position, and recasting any questions of the depth and authenticity for such alignments as an admission of intolerance towards all of those issues sourced to that assumed amalgamation.
To solve an assumed bias of oppression requires not just an assumption of the victims, but an assumption of the guilty.
Should it not always be acceptable to ask for evidence? Is denial itself the evidence of guilt? And what of those who plod along and agree to shoddily defined measures? Is their agreement also proof of consent for undefined manipulation?
When is semantic disagreement evidence of corruption? Is the conflict of semantics merely borne of a doomed interface of epistemology, naturally bound to one's immutable characteristics?
If something is in the name of justice, ust it be assumed to be legitimate? Or are we content to agree that the threshold of legitimacy relies upon name only?
There is a pervasive idea that there exists a particular form of knowledge, encapsulated within a community, and that in order for such knowledge to be shared within the greater world, it's required that those bearing the characteristics associated with that community be computably present in specific quantities and proportions. As though this is a reality bound to the typing of knowledge itself. Consequently, the corollary is that the knowledge is intrinsic, perhaps mystically, to the characteristics of the members of that community and, thus, this knowledge could only be understood and wielded by the members of that community. In order for this to be true, one need assume that this knowledge cannot be understood by members of other communities, and that acknowledging that knowledge has been shared is performed through extrapolating an evaluation of power by group. What this means is that in order for knowledge to be shared, the best we can hope for is a never-ending battle for power, or the uniformity of group, and not the sharing of ideas themselves.
What sort of conversation can teach and share ideas, if the presumption is that each side's knowledge is, by nature of the characteristics associated with each group, confined?
Alas, setbacks. Perhaps not the ones I've named - in fact, most of the setbacks that we note are personal ones, physical ones, emotional ones.
But what of a better world?
Unfortunately, it's not just in our best interest to act in such a manner as to not allow oneself to be set back, but when it needn't be so. Especially by those for whom the nature of their wishes remains unknown. It's a form of responsibility.
If, truly, one recognizes that there exists both good and evil, joy and tragedy, being experienced in the world, then surely one must desire to maximize the good and the joy. Except for, maybe, those bordering on psychopathy. They get a free pass, this time.
So, how can this be done? Should one believe that there is a difference, at the individual level, to be made? Is one able to tip the scale, so to speak? Is one capable of eliciting a perceptible change, by any temporal measure?
Perhaps one estimates the superlative effect of one's existence towards diminishing tragedy, and the valuation came up short. Is there a measurable and substantive reduction in tragedy that's too pathetically dismal to be worthy of concern? If it's not valuable enough, then it should follow that something else is more valuable. More worthy of precious time.
Reducing tragedy can have its consequences, especially even just for thinking about it.
Can this be met with courage?
What is it to be courageous? What is conflated? What can be labelled as courage without qualification?
Is there a method of critical analysis by which we can assert that a state or behaviour is courageous?
Who claims to have fear? Who claims to have courage? Is it courageous to lay claim to your fear?
Initiatives can be sought and declared as worthy of undertaking, by virtue of being a measure of courage. Could an endeavour which claims to be content with irrational or otherwise unwarranted fear, while promising that it itself, as demonstrated by careful labelling, could never be conceived of for anything but it's most noble purpose, be motivated by or borne out of fear itself?
An act of courage is an act performed steadfastly in spite of one's fear of a consequence to which one is aware. That is to say, the actor in question consciously acknowledges specific consequences that can result from the action, but is committed to performing that action for the value it yields.
Some hypothesize that many acts are courageous, many more than fit description. Small acts of courage -> perhaps there is a courage index, does it correlate with justice? While there may seem to be some sense to this belief, it may be premature to conclude as much. If one were to deconstruct a modest act of participation in a movement to which one has pledged allegiance, facilitated through a belief of congruence in ideals, or a belief in the power of a movement's symbols, then one might be inclined to clarify the notion of its consequences. If, for instance, the consequences were found to be within a range of social discomforts, such as having to endure words to which one would not normally wish to be exposed, but without a realistic expectation that such consequences also contain a threat to one's thriving and flourishing, or even to one's survival, then logic should compel one to dutifully make a distinction of risk.
One might argue against this weighting of clashing consequences, especially if a dichotomy of ideals can be conceived, on the basis that the bias to protect one's ignorance, or retain some form of obedience, essential to one's rhythm of being, might manifest a most pronounced bond within the covalence of one's interwoven conception of reality. Though this predilection may, too, be one for which some degree of sense might lurk in support, it is acutely susceptible to the same pitfalls which predicate its formulation. This leads us back through a seemingly never ending cycle - perhaps a cycle of humanity, or perhaps just one obliged to the biological, or to the conception of finite systems sporting a means of evaluated reflection. A longstanding presumption in the eternal challenge to this cycle is that in order to aim towards truth, one must embrace the conflict of exposing oneself to the strongest representation of the very ideas which one believes to be in defiance of those to which one is allegiant. A conflict that can only be adequately engaged, not by disproving those deceitful ideas, but aiming to prove them to see if they do, indeed, fall short.
If truly one is allegiant to their ideas, then they will wish to represent them with robust and exhausting understanding within a context which includes the ideas that oppose them.
Though our narration of history seems to contend that it is a tyranny of the majority which produces the greatest tragedies, any such tragedy began with an intransigent minority having coalesced to a point of inflection. Our imperfect and incomplete view renders it impossible for us to identify the harbinger of intransigence by mere labelling of the aesthetic. It is, instead, incumbent upon us to focus on the health of the process for the conversations themselves.
In order for the world to designate time for conversation, it will curtail time for blood.