The Shackles of Categorization

There are many types of people whom I find insufferable. People who lack any amount of empathy. People who automatically judge other people without getting to know them. People who say you owe them because they are your "friend". But even though I would never actively or consciously seek out their company, it is still my duty as a human being to interact with them, at least passively, and allow them a chance to better themselves through real human interaction (I'm not saying that people who interact with me always come out better for it, that's way to narcissistic for even me, but that social interaction is always a chance to pull yourself up the ladder of your life).


And people who just brush off these people who they deem "strange", "weird", or "undesirable" are merely humans in a biological sense, and they never actually look past themselves to help that girl who sat next to them in Biology for a whole semester and a half until one day she didn't come back and now she's gone and they could have helped her but they didn't. And who defines what is strange anyway? I think we can all agree that categorizing people never works. I mean, come on. You can't slap a generic label and neatly place everyone into nice little categories. That's just a few steps away from the feudal system, and there was only massive cultural, economical, political and scientific oppression for about a thousand years. And we continue to do it. Look around. Labels like "Democrat"and "Republican", "rich"and "poor", "smart" and "dumb" are prolific, and immensely destructive to any cross-class social bonding.
            

One of the major reasons that we continue to shackle ourselves to the raging machine of society is because stereotyping is such an affective marketing tool. I'm not saying that it's entirely the company's fault. It's ours too, for standing, oblivious to the walls being built and gaps being made between human beings. It's gone a little too far.

Now, I'm not calling for total anarchy. I'm not a pot-smoking 70s hippie holding up a peace sign. A little class distinction is ok. It allows us to think subjectively, and therefore to focus on the bigger picture. But to allow it to overcome us to the point where Hollywood uses class separation as one of the key elements in it's movies is a bit much. A proper balance should be found, met, and sustained. Where that balance is is for each generation to decide. They should just know what to look for first.

A Colorful Monochrome

Sometimes I think there is something genuinely wrong with me. My world view sometimes fluctuates so rapidly, and over such little things, that it scares me. I go from seeing the world in a depressing black and white to blindingly colorful and bright with hope so much that it hurts. And then back aging. Several times a day. It's exhausting.

And the affect this has in not just making me appreciate when I am truly happy, but it also distances me away from people. I'll be laughing along with them, making small talk and such, when all of the sudden, something someone says or does reminds me of all those dark corners of my mind. I'll trail off in mid-sentence and I won't be able to look away from the wall as I try to drag myself out of the deep, dark, suffocating pit in my soul. Why this happens, you ask? I don't know. I try to continue the conversation as if nothing happens, but my voice sounds false to even myself, my smile feels as plastic as rubber tires. All the while I'm still reeling form the sudden reminder of how lonely I really am.

I realize that now. That pit is loneliness. I once tried to think of someone I was truly open with. To my twisted amusement, I couldn't think of anyone. Certainly there are people who think they know me, maybe even understand me, but they don't realize that all they see is side of me I choose to present to them.

And then I remember how petty my problems seem. I'm a healthy white male middle class american who's never really been deprived of a meal or had to face any real loss. That makes my loneliness seem like a child whining for candy compared to the people who worry whether or not they will get a good meal and a safe place too sleep. Knowing his gives me perspective. And perspective is the thin rope that I desperately grasp in order to keep me from falling into the reach of that monster in my mind.

Descartes vs. Hume

Recently, I found myself, once again, wasting time on the internet. And one of my favorite pastimes is to watch youtube videos made by people like Vihart and John and Hank Green and Michael Stevens and Derek Muller and so on. And in doing so I occasionally find other channels of similar ideas and subject matter. I stumbled across two videos, each discussing the epistemological views of Descartes and Hume. The opposing forces struggling for supremacy is made funny by the fact that their views on epistemology are so similar, but they each oppose the other so directly it makes the image of Hume and Descartes arguing humorous.

Who where they? Rene Descartes is famous for spreading the use of the Cartesian plane, and also liked to dabble in philosophy in addition to mathematics. He bagan to wonder (probably during his midlife crisis); "How do we know anything?" All our knowledge seems to be based on previous knowledge. Because you couldn't, like, figure out the Pythagorean theorem without first knowing what a right triangle is and so on. So he did a thought experiment where he cleared his table of knowledge. He pretended that he knew absolutely nothing. And then he tried to find the fundamental facts of existence by putting things back onto his table of knowledge. He tried and failed with many pieces of information, but the only thing he could get back onto the able was:

"I think, therefore I am."

Meaning that you are experiencing things, and therefore you must be real. Everything else's existence is questionable at best.

Hume, on the other hand, liked to believe that all our experience was built on sensory inputs, and that everything is merely a string of sensory inputs and nothing is really real. Like we're in the Matrix or something.

So Hume's argument was that nothing was real, not even yourself. But Descartes is all like; "Yeah, nothings real, but I am experiencing these things, so therefore I must be real." And Hume's all like; "Nope! Sorry, you don't exist either, at least not on this plane of reality."

And this is funny because while they arrived at similar conclusions, their own conclusions were fundamentally opposed to each other by design. And thinking about two long-dead European philosophers bickering on whether or not they really exist while the rest of us are just like; "I just want the next Downton Abbey episode to air. I really don't care about epistemological quandaries pertaining to the existence of consciousness."