An Attempt At Thought Dissection

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

To give birth to oneself. I believe that's when you arrive at a point of self-actualization when everything you have allowed yourself to absorb arm you with the authority to decide for yourself what you want to be. And I say those words with all the gravity of their meanings. Decide for yourself what you want to be in terms of forming your mental helmets as how you define yourself in yourself. That whatever criticism or unluckiness the world may throw at you, you remain unwavering of who you are, taking no insults at these randomness. The mass mindset may not understand this but proving the validity of your view is just a waste of energy unless the view you need to prove serves a purpose in your favor. And we need all the favor we can get from people to wiggle through as rebels in this world of closed systems and soul-crushing mechanisms. The conflict you feel the most important to resolve is the conflict within yourself. You have learned that by cracking into this, you learn how to mirror yourself to and from people and you have learned close to accurate how this form of brain picking is, and you begin to comprehend the big picture of biological "robothood" and you understand the underpinnings of most human behaviors, which makes you kinder, much more patient, and most of all, humble. It's a form of freedom you have discovered to have the easiest access to. And you want to share to everyone this calmness and sense of oneness with the universe. 

Going back to common ideas of iconic religious men, it made me realize that this was what Jesus could have been talking about. How he is the father, the son, and the holy spirit had me speculating that your old self is the father, your self-actualized self is the son, and your cosmic sense of oneness with the universe is the holy spirit. I have always believed that these religious inscriptions were all metaphors of some kind of truth that the earlier people had a hard time to express because of the then-limitations of language. I believe Jesus alongside other religious men achieved this state of selfhood. 

But what happens next? You believe you need to spread this gift of thinking and living to people. But you just can't go out and babble words other people's consciousness are unable YET to comprehend. You would, of course, be labeled as mad. So like any other deceiving religious fuckhead, you utilize your knowledge of the world to "manipulate" people into seeing how you see the world. You use yourself as a mirror to them and this is  parallel to a form of crucifixion - you sacrifice yourself as a mirror in which other people can recognize their own humanity and hopefully improve themselves and climb higher the ladder of self-actualization.

It has been 2 weeks since a huge typhoon hit the Philippines. As of writing, the death toll is 4011 and based on the article bearing the news, the government stopped the official count there. There are a lot more dead bodies in the streets but the government officially stopped counting.

It was November 7th when Typhoon Haiyan hit landfall in the Philippines at Guiuan, Eastern Samar and caused a series of catastrophic events on Samar and neighboring Leyte and other island towns in the Visayas. The most badly hit being Tacloban City and the focus of most relief operations, since one, it is a city – it has the largest of population affected, two, everything was wiped out – food, infrastructures for medical aid, everything, three, the people have gone into mass hysteria because of food shortage – a lot of looting and killing has taken place.

After the storm has passed and aids have gone in, the country was in the international spotlight as news teams, medical teams, and every sort of team from every country imaginable, were sent to cover the devastation and to send help.

It was sad to see the Philippines stripped in all its nakedness for the world to see – how the incompetence of our government was exposed – not only to us, Filipinos, but to the whole world. It wasn't only the government that had its moment of shame but the Filipino people themselves as they bashed the government and each other in social media channels with regards to personal views on what should be done on the current national crisis and sending antigovernment sentiments for the lack of leadership in immediately sending remedy to the situation. It is all nauseating.

I have always had this passionate anger against my country. Do not get me wrong. I am in love with the Philippines. It's just that different aspects play out that the love I have for my homeland is not conflicting with the hate I have for it. In fact, my sentiments, put together, actually make sense. If I had to explain this to a Filipino simpleton, the response I would get would either be of the following: 1. I don't make sense, 2. I'm a person who can't make up her mind (“balimbing” would be the local term), 3. I am not nationalistic. All responses I deem incorrect and illogical because most of the “nationalistic” fools I have talked to are unclear with regards to their definition of nationalism. Most “nationalistic” Filipinos I know define being nationalistic as: 1. supporting/buying local goods 2. jumping in the celebratory bandwagon when someone Filipino wins a sporting competition or gets recognized internationally. The nationalism most people here speak of is shallow and plain ridiculous. In fact, there is no clear common definition what it is. It seems to be a vague concept to me and to everyone else when the word nationalism comes up.

I have been thinking about this whole nationalism thing for quite a while now. I have been ranting antinationalistic sentiments every time I spot fake nationalistic hurrahs whenever a boxing match is won by Manny Pacquiao or whenever someone with Filipino lineage gets recognized for doing something. It's ridiculous to announce “Proud to be Pinoy” every time some person with Filipino blood (no matter how diluted) gets recognized for something. One, that “Filipino” got recognized for doing what he did excellently and has nothing to do with his being Filipino. Two, it's quite stupid to affiliate oneself with the person recognized by stating sentiments of “proud to be Pinoy” since you contributed nothing to his work. As mentioned earlier, his efforts is owed to his hard work and not to his lineage.

It bothers me why Filipinos are like this. Why Filipinos think this way. Be all nationalistic without even knowing the nature of nationalism. It is questionable me how someone can be so passionate about something that is vague to him. I'm not just talking about nationalism here. I think the idea holds true if you cross to other ideologies. Filipinos can be so supportive of an ideology or a cause without knowing or understanding the very nature of that ideology or cause. It is again, ridiculous.

First things first, I will define how I view nationalism. I adhere to the common definitions and I will add some personal insights as to why the concept of Filipino nationalism is skewed. Generic definition, nationalism is a belief or ideology of being attached to one's nation. That's pretty broad actually. Let me try to be more specific. Basically, when one is nationalistic, one identifies with his national identity – social constructs and individual behaviors that support his country's decisions and actions. That's from a modernist point of view. From a primordialist point of view, nationalism is a natural evolutionary phenomenon that organizes humans into groups basing on their affinity of birth (in behavioral biology and sociology, the idea of homogamy can explain this).

Basing on those two main perspectives on nationalism, I shall form the following conjectures. One, let's tackle the primordialist point of view. The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,100 plus islands. Although it is one nation, it's pretty much scattered into little separate islands. From a national point of view, ideally, people would tend to be nationalistic since they come from one country but break that country into a thousand municipalities and towns and what you get are regionalistic bastards who organize themselves into small groups. The tribal mindset is seen at play which prevents a common generic ground to be grouped into a national level.

Second, I believe the modernistic point of view roots from the primordialist view since a nation cannot form socially constructed perspectives and behaviors leading to a national identity if they don't identify themselves in a group naturally. So picking up from the previous argument, it is valid to posit that there is no national identity for the Filipino to attach to. In fact, it was Jose Rizal, our national hero, who pointed out that one of the causes of indolence is the lack of national identity.

Following the train of thought of the two arguments, I guess it is safe to say that the Filipinos have no idea what their national identity is. It is kind of sad to blatantly point out that we have no national identity. We have a sense of national identity but what identity it is, is nonexistent. In turn, it explains a lot why our sense of identity is only linked to Filipinos winning sporting events or when someone Filipino gets recognized by the world. We are still a young nation finding our identity. We look for clues of who we are through petty things that put our country in the map. We were not given the chance to develop our own. We were an infant raped out of our cradles when the Spanish and all the other Western people came to colonize us. We are nothing but a mongrel nation.

I had to go to Jose Rizal and review what he has written more than a century ago. After all these years, the Filipino has not established what he is to himself yet and it made me think, could it be that laziness is the root of this identity crisis? Could the Spanish and all other Westerners who accused us of indolence be right? In his sociopolitical essay entitled, “Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos” (in English, On the indolence of the Filipinos), Jose Rizal defined what indolence is and set to defend that native indolence is a product of social construction brought about by the Spanish colonization.

Let us define the term for clarity. Indolence, to Rizal, is a word greatly misused to mean “little love for work and lack of energy”. Modern definition of indolence (or what we commonly refer to as laziness) is as simple as Wikipedia's description: “a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so.”

In the first chapter, Jose Rizal made it clear that indolence is, in fact, undeniable among the Filipino people. He went on to say that it is an effect rather than a cause of our backwardness and trouble. In Syed Hussein Alatas' The Myth of the Lazy Native, he reinforced this by pointing out that the idea of the lazy native is a one-sided colonial denigrating view of the Southeast Asians by the Western capitalists. Them Western whites upholding the idea that they define the world and their values as a means to measure against the Southeast Asian natives. The idea of indolence is a product of ideological conflict between the dominating and subjugating groups. According to him, what was concluded or accused as indolence was in fact the disinterest of the Filipinos in conducting trade in the spirit of modern capitalism. Another simple ideation of this conflict as Jose Rizal pointed out is that an hour's work under the Philippine sun is equivalent to a day's worth of work in temperate countries.

The second chapter went on to enumerate what the natives have been doing prior to Spanish rule – the active trades they were involved in within and outside the country, the abundance they produced from farming and mining and other industries they were engaged in, some were even speaking Spanish – all signify that the Filipinos had activity and life. Something they would not have if they were, by nature, indolent. Jose Rizal went to ask what went wrong that the native Filipino forgot his productive past. Is indolence the symptom or the cause of cultural backwardness?

The third chapter listed and argued a number of reasons that could have caused the cultural and economic decline of the Filipino natives. Among these include invasions and insurrections in the communities and the decline of native population as many have been sent to Spanish expeditions and wars. Basically, the forced labor for Spanish endeavors have left the natives' undertakings unattended. Their farms, mines, and trade have been abandoned for the capitalist's enterprise. And Rizal considers this as a deep root for the so-called indolence.

In the fourth chapter, which for me contains a huge chunk of his argument, declared that the Filipinos “are not responsible for their misfortunes, as they are not their own masters.” The Spaniards came and conquered and along with this, they have discouraged trade and labor among the natives. Commerce communications with the Chinese, Malays, and Arabs have ceased as the Spaniards imposed a lot of restrictions. Thus, trade has declined. As the hardworking Filipino tended his crops, pirate attacks and natural calamities got in the way but in no way did the government help him to restore his farm. As the monks and encomenderos took over their lands, the Filipinos were forced to work for them and had to suffer abuses, which left them no choice but to abandon their own fields. Everything was monopolized by the Spanish government. If one wants to do business, there were a lot of red tapes to go through and a lot of bribes to deal with. Add the doctrines of Catholicism and the lack of opportunity to education and you have the perfect formula to build a lazy mind set that predisposes a negative attitude towards work and life. With the constant reminder of the church that the rich will never go to heaven, what value does work have in the place of the Filipino mind? Why should the Filipino work his ass off for the gain of the Spaniard? The system was built entirely against the Filipino. How can he be motivated to work hard if his effort is never rewarded? What motivation is there in laboring furiously only to enrich the other? The constant struggle with himself to try to make sense of his state as a rat in a cage inevitably led to the deterioration of his values. He has nothing left to hope for except that the God of the Spaniards would have mercy on him.

The fifth chapter summarizes all of Rizal's points into two factors. Firstly, he argued that education and training were not available to the natives as it was freely available to the foreigners. Instead, inferiority was taught to them and reinforced with discrimination. Secondly, because of the learned inferiority, the Filipino native was not given the chance to explore himself as an individual and as a collective thereby, the non-existence of a national sentiment of unity with his fellow natives. Since no national identity was allowed to form and since he is inferior, the Filipino was bound to submit to the culture of the foreigner and do anything, everything, to imitate it. Rizal ends his essay with the proposal of a solution that only education and liberty could cure this malady of indolence.

Here we are, 123 years later, still struggling with the same problem. The Spaniards and Americans have left but the values they have taught us are deeply ingrained (claiming Rizal's argument that indolence is a product of complex experiences). We have struggled for liberty. We have struggled for education. But still we are tied to the clutches of indolence. After all the defenses Rizal has argued for us, here we are putting his belief in us to shame. What happened?

The Philippines is now a democratic country, claiming its independence in June 12, 1898 and establishing self-governance in March 24, 1934. As of August 2010, there are 2,180 recognized higher educational institutions (HEIs) in the country (HEIs refer to colleges, universities, institutes, and other post-secondary learning institutions). Liberty and education were Rizal's prescription. We now have liberty and we have education. What went wrong?

Here is my own deconstruction of things: the brand of indolence in the Filipinos is not just socially constructed. Generations after the trauma under Spanish rule (also the Japanese and the Americans, etc.), indolence has become an evolutionary heritage, a behavioral non-adaptive trait that has afforded the Filipinos a kind of biological and societal insurance and resilience to varying environments. Unaware or not, I have come to believe that the Filipinos are fatalistic. They feel that everything will go wrong so there's no use in putting efforts to things. Anyway, there's always God and luck to rely on (“bahala na”).

The Filipino is not lazy per se, but lazy rather in his thought life. Go to the country side and you will see Filipinos tending their fields under the heat of the sun. You will notice that even at the most inconvenient hours, the Filipino is busy holding a broom with his hand, cleaning whatever clutter he sees around him. In terms of labor, the Filipino is happy to just go about the triviality of everyday work. He, in fact, takes pleasure in it. But let him think, challenge his beliefs, and you will get the most mundane answers. Ask him why he does the sign of the cross when he passes by a church, he will tell you that it's tradition. Ask him about his opinion on the government and you will get old maid story answers like an update on the president's current girlfriend. Ask him about the conditions of economy and you get personal insights that never compound to a higher ideological or objective view. Ask him about the current post-typhoon crisis and get his opinion on the government's course of action; he will most likely comment which celebrity gave more donations and which celebrity was such a hypocrite.

It saddens me that regardless of how free or educated we claim to be as a Filipino people, our minds are really never free or educated. The religious mind set that has crossed over to other mental boxes has killed and is still killing our creativity, and has been and is still putting a roadblock to our path to discover ourselves and our national identity. It is that internal narrator in our heads that always tells us what should be done instead of doing what we want to do – the idea of pursuing things that go out of the accepted beliefs/traditions could be a sin and the idea of eternslly burning in hell for it does not motivate at all. Add the power of inferiority that still lingers and you have the perfect concoction that limits us as individuals and as a nation.

Integrate technology to that idea of liberty and education and you have a modern mindless Filipino struggling for self-worth in the social media setting. Here comes modern Filipino making a cyber comment and he feels like he is actually contributing to society and affecting the world. Thus, reinforcing his laziness. He is too afraid to think for himself. The ghost of foreigner's past is always behind his subconscious leading him to imitate and please the ghost with regards to his opinions and thoughts. Whatever he thinks will be a popular opinion, he will acquire that or go entirely against it for a moment of self-worth. A moment of little self-worth elevation is enough to keep the modern Filipino going. So it has become a habit for him to observe events and comment first about it on social media, an opium for self-aggrandization. Because in reality, he is still the lazy Filipino too scared to do anything to affect the system he has grown comfortable with.

We are a free people with access to education and technology. We live in a time wherein information endlessly pours. It has now become a matter of pushing ourselves to actually start questioning things that were indoctrinated to us and start standing up for things we believe in. Cliche as it may sound, I think that in order to realize the Filipino national identity, we should start with knowing ourselves. Now that we understand the underpinnings of our neuropsychology and why we are wired into laziness, we now have the power to go against it.

I am not prescribing a solution but I am hoping that by way of this writing, I have shown you how it is to have freedom to think and to pursue a thought. I have struggled with laziness in the process of writing this but as I have said earlier, you can always go against the built-in laziness.

What I have learned from reading a lot of Maria Popova is to “allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.” Which leads me to what Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

I keep hearing it over and over again how pain and disappointment teach one to be strong. I disagree. Nothing is taught. We just learn to cope. And coping, whatever form it may be, leads to callousness.

Callousness is like reinforced self-preservation. I hate self-preservation. Self-preservation is only doing things when there are guarantees. It is not putting effort because you know your effort won’t be rewarded well. It’s like a depersonalization shell that separates you from your humanity and from the awe of experience.

Once upon a time, you believed in magic. Now it’s all replaced with malice. Once you thought people had pure hearts and intentions, now you think you see through them and you always figure out you’re just another means to an end for them.

The problem with easily trusting people, is you easily see through them after a while.

The only person you can really trust in this abyss of existence is yourself. And sometimes it’s even harder to trust oneself.

In the words of Trent Reznor, if I could start again, I would keep myself.

Everyday, it gets so much harder to live with myself.

Every experience seems to set me up for disappointment. I dread the feeling of hope. I dread the feeling of excitement. I hate the prelude of feelings to happiness. They just mean new things to cause pain and frustration. 

Also, it sucks that you can't blame people for putting you through these emotional and psychological rides. You only have yourself to blame for allowing them to get through to you. It pretty much sucks, too, that there are opportuning bastards, although pretty much aware of your situation, manage to wiggle their way through your softness and disinhibition and make you a means to their end. Human filth is human nature. 

I am so tired of everything. So tired of hoping that my situation would change. So tired of putting effort into making changes. All my efforts amount to nothing. I try objectifying all these feelings as products of a mental disorder so I no longer have to feel them. But being numb is still a feeling. And it's very heavy.

After all these years and experiences, I am back to this realization: nothing can save me from myself. I don't even know if I have the capacity to save myself. I am so drained and so frustrated from all the trying I have done and for all the hope I put into people and events.

I am a constant soup of everything I devour. A mash-up of everything I let into my life. The only thing I constantly recognize about myself is that I am a child of the universe and a citizen of the world.

The self is not a thing. But a process. An exciting and chaotic process of transcendence. A tiring one, too, to be honest. Always in discontent. Always in the search for a better version. The bottom line, always running away from misery. Which boils down to always searching for the connection to put meaning in all the chaos of self-doubt.

Trauma after trauma, we deconstruct ourselves and transcend our hurtful experiences, creating and evolving ourselves with the wisdom that pain brought along. With reconstruction after reconstruction, we become soft and ego-less. At times, brewing with kindness. At times, slow to anger. At times, numb. At times, vulnerable. Most of the time, tired. 

We settle with solidarity. We become comfortable with being by ourselves. We become contented with a life absent of complications brought about by relationships. Until we meet certain people who challenge our choice of being alone.

There have been a number of personalities I have met that have provoked the valid life choice of being alone. Stories of rare connections. Conversations that only happen for a fleeting moment. Connections that happen only at a certain point of life. Connections that can only be captured with still images but cannot be sustained or prolonged. Connections that teach you more about yourself and challenge you to think. Connections that make you feel alive for a moment and leave you sparkling yet confused for a while. Connections that are critical to a transition point of a specific phase in your life. Fleeting moments of honesty. Fleeting moments of courage to speak up. Fleeting moments of unjudged loud introspections. Moments of having to not think about what you have to say without the worry that comes with maintaining a relationship. Moments of truth that leave you with profound insights.

These are the others I have met. Free souls. Free spirits. Self-actualized people who have been through life’s shits. People who make you open up to them and to yourself. People comfortable with who they are that they don’t give a shit about what you think of them and seem to say it’s okay to be who you are. Strangers who make you feel good about yourself. Strangers who, for a moment, make you feel that you are not alone and for that time window, you can actually trust another human being. Unassuming strangers who are as lost as you are in this existence trap. Search for them and you’ll find yourself. As I have at certain points of my life

But there are also those few others (or just the other in my experience) who not only challenge your valid life choice but make you long for connection. These are the ones who will (knowingly or unknowingly) insist their existence in your life and make you yield to emotions. For all those times you thought you were numb, here comes a storm of emotions, unfamiliar with such overruling power, that grips you and consumes you and leaves you questioning if you really do know yourself. You feel things you don't want to feel and you become powerless to resist them. You try to toughen yourself up to ignore this irrationality that has suddenly taken hold of your consciousness and in a moment of clarity you realize that what you could be feeling is love. And that moment reveals to you how naked you are, how miserable you are, how vulnerable you are. And you realize your nothingness. And you feel that urge to be.

In a moment of desperation brought about by circumstances, you realize that things will never go your way all the time. That things are as they are as they should be. And people are as they are as they should be. Things don't happen for a reason. They just happen.

People come and people go. What they teach us is that what we really are fighting is ourselves or part of our former selves. We fight because we are not somethings. We are a process. And we need repugnance to keep up with the process.

I am here again. In this blank state of self where everything I have worked towards seems to fail after every try. In this emptiness of self-doubt where I figure out what aspect of myself I am going to explore next to keep the waiting worthwhile. Waiting has become the substitute for living after everything seems to be screwing up. I need something to become of myself to remind myself that I am still alive.

But what is life really? Everything I have learned becomes useless once I am back to this state of nothingness. I feel like I am never good enough for this life. For the people who exist in it. 

I have tried finding things bigger than myself that I can dedicate my life to. But one thing I have learned these past three years, things just never work out no matter how hard I try. Now, I am back to feeling worthless. I know when I am feeling worthless. Because that's when I start to write. And I have this need to write again. To make sense of things. Again.

I hate this need to make sense of things. Why is it there in me? Why can't I just live like everyone else and be okay about things not making sense? How do you go about just living? I wish I could unlearn everything I have learned and just go back to being innocent. To just be in peace and not think about things. But could you just be in peace with being ignorant? How does that even work?

I think the problem with me is I ask all these ridiculous questions. These ridiculous questions bubbling from within. Who can answer these questions for me but myself? Why do I even bother to ask in the first place? Why am I wired this way? 

All I want is to just live in peace with myself. Have enough money to enjoy the things I want to do. Contribute to society. Make the world a better place. Does this make me a delusional motherfucker? Why do I even bother with these things?

I have been through a lot of traumatic life experiences and I just want everyone who went through the pains of life to know that they're not alone. Is this a Messiah complex? Is this a disorder that I have?

Why can't life just be good for everybody? Why do I even have these ridiculous ideals? But when I really think about it, they don't sound too ridiculous because they could be possible. It's just that the social constructs of life render them impossible. How do we even break through these social constructs? 

I should stop asking. To ignore things completely, I think, is the secret to contentment and maybe happiness. But the fact that you are consciously ignoring things, would that take its toll on you?

I just wish I was dead. But that doesn't change things either. How do I get through this phase and this life? How do other people do this shit? Is luck really a huge player in this case? 

Lately, I’ve been rethinking about my stand on sex equality and feminism.

Having gone through a lot of psychological and emotional abuse/manipulation from growing up with a mother who was skilled at emotional blackmailing and having gone to school with girl classmates who are instinctively good at psychological bullying, I’ve learned to be a misogynist at an early age. Ironically, I’m a girl.

I grew up with two brothers who didn’t treat me as a girl (nor a boy) and a pretty cool dad who let me do whatever I want to do. Hanging out with the boys usually included ultra chill time lying around the living room and reading comic books and newspapers, and playing records, and playing with my brothers’ car toys. The summers before puberty, I’d join them going topless around the house. I always lost in peeing contests but I loved being a part of the “wolf pack”. But every time my mom enters the scene, there’s this air of tension that would sweep over me and make me feel guilty for rolling around the floor with the boys. As if I wasn’t entitled to the same lazying around because I was a girl and every time, I would feel that I had to do something, like clean stuff up, to feel some sort of worth in front of her eyes. I was always baffled where that feeling came from. That there’s something off in there, that something just didn’t make sense.

Moving on with the story. Okay, so I started going to primary school, a co-ed by the way. How the girls interacted baffled the hell out of me. There’s always this notion that they’re saying something but mean another; they’d manipulate details to make them look like they are the victims in a situation in order for them not to owe up to their mistakes (later on in life, though, I’d learn that this was also true to a portion of the male population). I’ll point an example (please bear with all the segues). In third grade, a group of three girls befriended me. They’d ask me to join them buy snacks during recess or ask me to join them for lunch (as I was always hanging around by myself). The initial interactions were new and exciting to me. I loved the idea of being in a group, the sense of welcome and belonging was an overwhelming wave of validation. Until I started getting choked by the fumes of what feminism has planted in the societal mindset in its raw form that you can find in the politics of how little girls interact. Every time I hang out with my “friends” and one of them was not around (Girl C), one of the two girls (Girl A) would start backbiting the other girl who’s not present and the other girl (Girl B) would join in the nonsensical attack of Girl C. This baffled me. By the time Girl C shows up, I’d be in a state of confusion if I should keep on talking to her or not (I am slightly autistic and have a hard time keeping track with unwritten societal codes). However, Girls A and B go on talking to Girl C as if nothing happened. This led me to ask if it was okay that I interact with Girl C as well knowing well what Girls A and B said. Fast forward, I ended up eating alone the rest of the school year after that. The two girls denied what they said and claimed I was trying to destroy the three girls’ friendship because I was jealous. Rumors also spread that I was a tattle-tale and I was such an envious bitch of a kid. That experience plagued me until my adult life, collecting only a few girl friends who happen to be of similar disposition to me.

I didn’t have a lot of girl friends and by the time high school rolled in, I preferred guy friends over girl friends. I almost always have to second guess what girls mean when they say things. I didn’t get the logic of indirectly saying things wherein you cause confusion instead of stating things as they are. I didn’t get the rationale behind the conscious misuse of language, the intentional misconstruction of linguistics to communicate an entirely different truth but utilizing the exact similar language patterns. When you communicate with girls, you always find your mind in a blackhole of confusion where you end up saying or doing things which they lead you into committing to through the strategy of the sense of entitlement they feel that you have to appease them.

This sense of entitlement, I assume, may be of evolutionary roots. Since female humans have the bigger sex cells, they have higher parental investment compared to male humans. For a female, each potential child is a huge investment because she has to carry the child for 9 months inside the womb. A male human, on the other hand, the investment is usually just copulation. This hardwired aspect of reproduction, although genetically programmed, doesn’t mean it’s not fixable in cultural terms.

In the modern age, men and women have the choice not to become parents. Sex functions other than reproduction. There are options available like contraception and abortion when a woman doesn’t want to invest her genes and time on a child. Equally, a man has the options to be safe as well in spreading his genes. This leads me to conclude that women should rethink the sense of entitlement they have on manipulating the gender issue if they seriously want to be treated “equally”.

What do I actually mean when I say “manipulating the gender issue”? Females, in general, deem themselves the weaker sex because of the mentioned parental investment theory. Since women invest a lot, of course it would be logical for them to look for the healthy partner with awesome genes so as to her 9 months of investment and the years after that would not be put to waste (which seems to be pretty hard nowadays). The hardwired genetic programming from early evolution gave rise to a societal mind set that is mercilessly reduced to women being the weaker sex and that men exercise dominion over women (patriarchy).

When feminism came into the picture, women activists started working for equality rights, which when you objectively examine are idea systems biased against men. How can one work towards equality when the tenets of gender equality these feminists talk about only include how women should be treated and protected regardless how much inequality (their equality movement) these bring to the opposite sex? How do you work towards equality when women’s rights are protected and men’s rights aren’t?

Feminists need to define what they mean when they say equality. Feminists should stop being pussies and own up to their contradicting ideas. They should rethink their stands. Just because they have the right to speak up about their vaginas doesn’t mean what they’re saying is right.

I hope I made sense. I promise to reconstruct and edit this soon. I’d like to clearly define my points.

Every word is a lie. Every letter rhymes.

Language is just an abstraction of our internal experience/s.

The pouring in of endless information in a news feed, in a timeline. Tidbits of understanding of modern neurobiological concepts. The modern understanding of science and technology becoming our understanding of human behavior. Creating epic contexts for ourselves (borrowed from Jason Silva). These are the things that techno-optimism thrive on. These are the ideas I live by.

In a third world setting where only a few people put importance on self-actualization but everyone seems to have access to the internet, techno-negativism is killing creativity.

I’ll expound on this thought when I’ve time. Just brainmarking this here.

I like being self-absorbed. I tend to nervously blabber so I don’t have to listen. I don’t want to listen.

Listening is a weakness. It allows one to see oneself in others. Seeing oneself in others is a window to the soul that softens a person. Listening is a gateway to intimacy. It is allowing oneself to be attached to others. Man should be free from attachments.

Man is an island. A miserable dying island.

All women are capable of arousing a man's desire. When this capability is recognized, a pleasant-looking woman is labeled a slut or a whore. An ugly woman, however, remains unlabeled.

Everyone's a slut. Society is ridiculous.

About a year ago, after listening to a Radiolab episode, I posted a line I strongly related to. It was an articulation of a thought I had to copy word per word because I couldn't have translated the idea any better. 

It’s overwhelming sometimes to realize the big gap of how the world sees us from how we see ourselves.

The realization is/was so rich that the epiphany had me learning how to separate from myself and take on the mainstream "mental helmet" and look at myself through that "mental helmet". Such a surreal experience to observe myself with a different mindset. It had me realizing that indeed, some of my quirks are indeed...quirky. Although I am comfortable with depersonalization, prior to this experience, I tend to observe myself as myself. Viewing myself through a different mental helmet was an entirely new experience. This "mind hack", though, made me extra paranoid in social situations (I still get extra paranoid most of the time). I had to learn and administer self-conditioning techniques before I could use this sort of "telepathy" to my advantage. Getting inside other people's heads expanded in a whole new dimension.

Constant practice of my "conditioned depersonalization" in social situations improved and perfected my judgmental skills. And it kind of led to another concept which also relates to understanding the self and others.

The other concept was born after I was taking photos of myself. The emotions I was trying to convey during the shoot did not translate into the facial expressions captured. For example, in my head, I thought I was smiling, but if you look at the captured image, I wasn't smiling at all. In another photo, I tried internalizing and transmitting sexy, but the photo only ended with me looking weird and awkward (hahaha). Following the train of thought of the previous epiphany, it is baffling and overwhelming to me to realize the big loss of information upon manifesting a thought physically through facial expressions and gestures. 

The realization of big data loss upon physical translation of an internal conscious experience had me realizing that the gap of how the world sees us from how we see ourselves is a whole lot bigger. And all my judgments only seem real to me and may not be true to the person whose head I'm trying to get into. Ah, reality! Now, everything is back to being absurd.

The moral of this realization: the percentage of error in translating our mental lives into the physical is LARGE. Meaning, we, ourselves, cannot accurately communicate our own intentions. It is safe to assume then that how we interpret other people's "data" is highly erroneous. Ergo, our "measurements" of other people are useless. 

*Mental helmet wearing is somehow similar to shoe shifting (putting on other people's shoes). I define it as the ability to shift into multiple (opposing) mindsets while thinking for yourself and at the same time being able to criticize your own thinking. (Because no helmet size fits all.)

I (don't) believe in God, the Father Almighty, (there are no evidences that he's the) creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our (the 12 disciples' gay) lord, who was conceived by the holy spirit and born of the virgin Mary (which is biologically impossible), suffered under Pontius Pilate (among other Christus who did, if he did exist), was crucified, died, and was buried.

He descended into the dead (that is, if he was actually clinically dead) and on the third day, he rose again (most probably from a comatose).

He ascended into heaven (which is a non-existent place) and is seated at the right hand of the father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead (during the zombie apocalypse).

I (don't) believe in the holy spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting (not at all).

R'amen!

Suicide doesn't violate God's will. In the argument that we are all God's special creations, God specifically wired some people's neurons to commit suicide as a response to stressful situations. Hence, committing suicide is not a sin and is morally sound.