tot_Ou_tard
Well-known member
aka Rocket Fuel or the black hole at the center of the milky way.
Rocket has received grief for being negative & a misanthrope. This thread is dedicated to allow him room to be himself.
People are often not what they appear at first glance. Darkness is not equivalent to evil nor is upsetting the apple cart the same thing as violence. My inclinations have always been to let people be themselves. You learn a lot more from that than from trying to get everyone to feel a false unity. Some of the deepest, wiset, and kindest people I have known have caused some disturbance in the scenes in which they found themselves.
A little story from my past:
A long time ago I lived in hippie central in Humboldt County California. Many people had changed their names to names of flowers or to spiritual names. There were many vegans. Most had arrived from elsewhere & were happy to get away from the restrictive environments from whence they came & they prided themselves on their tolerance. Most were sweet, sweet souls, but the scene was also chock full of pretension, vapid insights, & forced unity.
Enter a hard-drinking, poker-playing, smoking, steak-eating, no nonsense musician with an hilariously dark sense of humor. He came to be with his girlfriend who was deeply into the scene. As you can imagine he caused all kinds of stir just by being himself. This tested people's notions of tolerance. I found him a lot of fun to be around & he became my best friend. His dark view was illuminating & his willingness to speak the truth was liberating.
On to Dark Matters.
I do not think that there are a greater percentage of crazies today than at any other time in human history, but the mind is a delicate & complex system which is prone to being in a state of unstable equilibrium. Stresses in the environment can disturb this uneasy balance. The news gets transformed into something strange which fits into a very personal world-view which we would call insane. Have you every accidently entered into someones inner world? I have. My wife & I call it setting off the nuts.
We were at a grocery store once in the produce section talking about whether we needed tomatos or something & all of a sudden a woman starts ranting & raving about tomatos & god & the devil or some such thing. It's like being an actor in a play that you didn't know you were starring in for a while.
I tend to view culture as similar to this woman but just involving a greater number of brains stuck in the same story. The staus quo is the staus quo just because enough people agree with each other. The status quo changes over time but if look closely you will find that the new thoughts of the culture which now seem self-eveident were being thought previously by a small number of people who were decidely outside the staus quo before.
Some degree of unity is required for stability, a lack of unity is necessary for change. Humanity has always soaked in a rough insider/outsider mix.
They key point to be aware of when things start to move is to make sure that the culture does not agree to mass hysteria. We always need truthtellers & trendbuckers to keep society from becoming vaporlocked.
Rocket has received grief for being negative & a misanthrope. This thread is dedicated to allow him room to be himself.
People are often not what they appear at first glance. Darkness is not equivalent to evil nor is upsetting the apple cart the same thing as violence. My inclinations have always been to let people be themselves. You learn a lot more from that than from trying to get everyone to feel a false unity. Some of the deepest, wiset, and kindest people I have known have caused some disturbance in the scenes in which they found themselves.
A little story from my past:
A long time ago I lived in hippie central in Humboldt County California. Many people had changed their names to names of flowers or to spiritual names. There were many vegans. Most had arrived from elsewhere & were happy to get away from the restrictive environments from whence they came & they prided themselves on their tolerance. Most were sweet, sweet souls, but the scene was also chock full of pretension, vapid insights, & forced unity.
Enter a hard-drinking, poker-playing, smoking, steak-eating, no nonsense musician with an hilariously dark sense of humor. He came to be with his girlfriend who was deeply into the scene. As you can imagine he caused all kinds of stir just by being himself. This tested people's notions of tolerance. I found him a lot of fun to be around & he became my best friend. His dark view was illuminating & his willingness to speak the truth was liberating.
On to Dark Matters.
I do not think that there are a greater percentage of crazies today than at any other time in human history, but the mind is a delicate & complex system which is prone to being in a state of unstable equilibrium. Stresses in the environment can disturb this uneasy balance. The news gets transformed into something strange which fits into a very personal world-view which we would call insane. Have you every accidently entered into someones inner world? I have. My wife & I call it setting off the nuts.
We were at a grocery store once in the produce section talking about whether we needed tomatos or something & all of a sudden a woman starts ranting & raving about tomatos & god & the devil or some such thing. It's like being an actor in a play that you didn't know you were starring in for a while.
I tend to view culture as similar to this woman but just involving a greater number of brains stuck in the same story. The staus quo is the staus quo just because enough people agree with each other. The status quo changes over time but if look closely you will find that the new thoughts of the culture which now seem self-eveident were being thought previously by a small number of people who were decidely outside the staus quo before.
Some degree of unity is required for stability, a lack of unity is necessary for change. Humanity has always soaked in a rough insider/outsider mix.
They key point to be aware of when things start to move is to make sure that the culture does not agree to mass hysteria. We always need truthtellers & trendbuckers to keep society from becoming vaporlocked.
