Theme
11:58am June 3, 2014

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

patternsmaybe:

youneedacat:

I didn’t think this should need any explanation, but apparently it does.  I’ve explained it before I think, but it couldn’t hurt to explain it again.

Sometimes I vigorously celebrate certain qualities that I have, certain experiences I have had, certain things I have done, certain ways that I do things.

This does not mean that I am putting down the way anyone else does things.  This is true even when I point out the flaws in other ways of doing things.

Most of these things that I celebrate like this?  Are things that I have been told all my life make me bad, defective, wrong, stupid, horrible, and broken.  Most of the things that I may end up criticizing in the course of all this, are things that have been held up to me all my life as perfection, as how things should be, as how people should think, as how everyone’s brain should work.

If your brain happens to not work like mine, I am not putting you down in any way.  Even if your brain works in a way that it does things that I criticize to some extent.  I am just trying to take a tiny, tiny bit of space in the world where I can say that who I am, the way I have been built, the way my brain works, is not horrible, and in fact can do some things better than the usual ways.

You’re being defensive in a way that scares me. I’m worried about you.

I’ve meant to write this post for awhile.  For years, people have reacted to my celebrating traits that have always been deplored in my life, as if I’m putting their traits down somehow.  And I’m sick to death of dealing with that.

Like I created the idea of ‘mental widgets’ in order to explain something that my brain can’t do.  And to explain that because my brain can’t do it, people think I’m incapable of discussing politics and ethics in any meaningful way.  So I tried to describe all the highly meaningful ways that my brain can do politics and ethics without using mental widgets.

Then immediately this guy accused me of being “abusive” for coming up with “pejorative words” for the “only way he could think”.  Then he went on to tell everyone what a horrible abusive person I am for using the word widgets.  Even though most people use widgets, and all I was doing was showing how my brain differs from the majority.  His brain happened to be in the majority in that regard.  

And that’s one of a long long list of crap like that, that I’ve gotten over the years, every time I try to celebrate anything about who I am.  I’m tired of it.

I’m surprised that you didn’t think you were judging things with that post about widgets. Because I thought you were and I agreed with what I thought you were saying.

Which is that people connect things that aren’t connected and fight hard for the connections over the reality.

Using abstract ideas, thinking in abstract ideas, that’s fine. But thinking the abstract ideas are more real than the things they’re describing is not fine.

And that’s what I thought that post was about.

It wasn’t?

That’s all absolutely what the post was about.  But nowhere in the post did I say that there was something wrong with the brains of people who most easily thought of things in terms of widgets.  And widgets was never meant to be a pejorative term.  This is what I mean by an instance in which my brain does something better than the ordinary way people’s brains do things.  But it doesn’t mean I’m sitting there going “you’re defective because your brain leads you towards widgets more easily than it leads you towards anything else”.  And I got a lot of feedback to the effect that that’s exactly what I was saying.

And honestly I think I got that feedback because most people thought my way of doing things was automatically defective.  And because they thought I was just flipping it upside down and calling them defective.

But yes, I was definitely judging widgety thinking as a negative thing.  As in, a thing that gets negative and dangerous results.  But I wasn’t saying anything about the type of brain that tends to create widgets more readily than other brains, being defective or evil or bad, and I certainly wasn’t being ~abusive~ about the matter.  I was judging widgets-as-ethics, yes, but I wasn’t… doing what any of these people said I was doing.  And it got very tiresome to hear people assuming I was judging them as people, and their innate brain style, which I was most certainly not doing.

Do you see the difference?

Not clearly, no. 

I agree that you weren’t being abusive. But I don’t understand what you mean by not judging the kind of brain that thinks in widgets.

Okay so…

I was judging what happens when you use widgets in an ethical situation.  I was saying this is bad this has bad outcomes, this always hurts people, this is really destructive.

I was not, however, saying, “Your brain is broken because you think really abstractly and that often leads you into the land of widgets.  It is irredeemable.  You have no hope of ever doing anything ethically and having it come out okay.”

People assumed, constantly, that I was saying the latter, just because I was saying the former.

It’s sort of like the difference between…

…the way my brain best handles things does not go hand-in-hand well with rationality, and has a tendency to fly well off the deep end if not tethered by some other kind of thinking.  It can be very insightful in some ways.  But it can also be very dangerous, leaping to conclusions that aren’t real, and not being able to tell the difference between the conclusions it’s leapt to, and reality.  That’s the danger of the kind of pattern thinking that I have.

You can talk about that.  You can judge that.  You can say it’s dangerous in certain situations, because it is. 

But you can judge that, and talk about it, and talk about the dangers, without ever saying that my brain is broken and that there’s no way I’ll ever be able to think properly, and that I might as well just give up on trying to understand things through forming sensory patterns, at all.

There’s a difference.  And I don’t think I crossed that line with that post, but a lot of people assumed I was saying their brains were broken and bad and stuff.