Talk is cheap, cheaper than ever. But listening is expensive, prohibitively so.
We live in a fractal of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Every screen is a cave wall, every idea on the internet is a dancing shadow. People will tell you their ideas, they will try to sell you their idols. They want you to participate in their ritualistic egregore.
The person worth believing is not the person who talks in the fanciest way. The best thing is never the coolest thing. The shiniest object is rarely the most beautiful. The information worth listening to is never dressed up, but is instead weighed down by its own capacity. It is handicapped and bitter to taste. It must be acquired through iatrogenesis.
The truth upholds the fragrant earth and makes the living water wet. Truth makes fire burn and the air move, makes the sun shine and all life grow. A hidden truth supports everything. Find it and win. - The Ramayana
The opposite of good is not bad but harmless.
The opposite of bad is not good but mundane.
What is good is truly good. I feel that we don’t believe this anymore.
What is bad is truly bad. Right now, it’s bad for you. It’s causing you harm, right this second. And likewise, what is good is good - right now, right this moment it is transcendent bliss entering your psyche. It is like seeds being planted in the wet earthy ground. How good must it feel to be a seed? Perhaps we should all aspire to such feeling.
Talk is cheap. I knew this, but I really do feel it now. I wish talking was more expensive, maybe people would figure out something better to say. They’d have to risk more to say it, they’d have to make sure they had something to say at all.
Listening should stay expensive. People have a limited amount of time per day to listen to things; it’s a very valuable commodity. You would hope that the supply of talk to the demand of listening would balance out somewhere at a respectful equilibrium that values everyone’s time and effort. Unfortunately we are so far away from that. People like to take advantage of people’s listening by talking to them using spells and hypnotic language. This is what something like Twitter or ‘the discourse’ is, to me.
Though, I personally am very optimistic. I know where we’re going. I do think that the nihilism of the current age has made talk even cheaper, made the words mean less and deliver less information per sentence. In fact there’s now a sort of rebellion inherent in people’s language, where this nihilistic worldview births a kind of looping, recursive meaning in the words and phrases. It’s kind of like when people thought making noise music was a rebellion against form or something. Saying a lot but really saying not much at all. I don’t know how else to put it.
But, when I really think about it, I have to imagine that even giving thought to that other is a waste of time, it is like paying attention to a spoonful of oil in a castle of mirrors. It is like feeding a basilisk, which coils around an unseen noumena.
Because I am optimistic and I know where we are going, I think it’s important to be as clear as I can. I think clarity is the language of the faithful, those who feel a need to serve God and humanity. It would be a disservice to my fellow man to obscure myself any more than I already do, to leave more than just gestalt space between the ideas.. I feel that cheap talk is a waste, or suboptimal use of this manmade science. After all language is a technology, and I like hammers.