Sunday, July 1, 2018

Help me figure this out


I need help figuring this out. I really don’t get a certain dissonance between my views and the views of a select other group of people that seems surprisingly large. I ask for this help because some people seem to state things that are not just at odds with my opinion but seems so fundamentally at odds with to me things that seem axiomatic and necessary that I presume either there is some mistranslation or that there is a massive psychological difference between us.

Let me begin with a simple premise that surely anyone can agree with; consistency is good.

What I mean by this is that it is better for things to align correctly then to be misaligned. This to me is the very…. the foundation of cognition and thought. Rationality requires that the rules of reality do not suddenly shift. Ethics require that morality does not suddenly shift. We presume that there is a constancy to how things work.

I can honestly say that I judge primarily all things by a single metric, everything and that metric is the metric of elegance, or unity you could translate it. It is the metric of Anti-Chaos.

What do I mean by that? When I say “elegance” I refer to the synching up of elements that are disparate. Again “Unity” may be another good translation for the concept I intuit. Let me give examples from fiction and perhaps it will make this more concrete.

If a character acts one way but then goes out of character acts contrary to their nature, that would be a de-synching of character’s past and character’s present and is therefore an inelegance that is bad. It is a disunity, a lack of stability in the fictional universe’s rules. The same would apply if a character acts irrational in a way that is not internally consistent. That is a desynching of the character and reality and thus is an inelegance and bad.

There is a sort of…. semi-ontological and semi-spiritual aspect to this…it is the grandest realization to me that everything is one…that all things are derived from primordial principle that the laws of the reality trace backwards more and more fundamentally until one reaches origin. The ideal fiction, or anything really, is derived similarly, as the elegant extension of what is.

Perhaps it would be easier to explain what seems at odds with elegance. Other people seem to not only not mind but outright enjoy what I would describe as inelegance. Disunity. Arbitrary-ness. Often, they will describe it something like “quirky” or the like and I don’t…. I can’t intuit that idea as except as being in opposition to the elegance that is vital. Things that are seemingly random or are added without purpose are shallow, meaningless and detract from the unity. It’s difficult to even speak of this because it’s so intuitive and all-encompassing in my mind. The pursuit of coherence, elegance, and unity, I can say without exaggeration, makes up every action, thought and feeling that I have. The avoidance of discord, arbitrariness, and disunity.

Very popular series will often put things together that don’t go together, and this in itself is supposed to be taken as enjoyable to witness…and I don’t get it. I legitimately feel no enjoyment from watching disparate elements act out of concert with each other.

Even with my favorite series in fiction, I don’t get any enjoyment from things that are disunified or inelegant. The absolute ideal work of fiction, one which is impossible for humanity to actually achieve but is the sort of platonic ideal of what should be, is I would imagine a work where everything is so perfectly elegant and unified that every moment of it is exactly what it ontologically must be, and each part works in perfect unison towards the whole. Again, this is not something that can ever be, but it is the platonic ideal to me that shows what should be good. What’s weird to me is I will sometimes hear people suggest things in this direction, but they will not take it to it’s logical extreme.

I become somewhat uneasy when people act in opposition to this because it is so central to how my mind works that if other people truly do not feel it, then it suggests their minds are very alien indeed.
I cannot overstate how… central this is to all my thinking. Everything I think, even what seems to be agreed on with others, is derived from the notion of the central elegance and unity of the cosmos, and on it’s goodness and desirability. Everything I believe and have stated, I can defend as being derived from the notion of the underlying unity to all things, and I do all I can to try and purge my mind of inconsistency. A and Not-A absolutely cannot both be true. This is the basis for which all truth must be understood, that the antithesis premises can not both be true, ignoring semantic word games. From this, I have done my best to derive my view, consistent with the notion that the universe does not contradict itself.

That so many others do not share this notion, is a deeply troubling notion to me, for it suggests a relative isolation of the self.

So please help me figure this out; why do others not just tolerate but enjoy a deliberate creation of disunity, a deliberate inelegance.

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