Conservation & Activism

This is a topic that’s been featuring in my mind quite a lot recently. Maybe it’s because I’m at that age where I am surrounded by students, and an environment of learning breeds awareness for causes. Animals, ecology, civic responsibility, the arts, the conservation of human rights, the education system, the usual stuff that people care about and won’t tolerate when it gets kicked in the gutter. Personally I think a lot of it is wasted effort. I think someone would make more of an impact breeding an artificial food staple and introducing it to the human population than they would picketing outside a fishery, and even more impact than blowing that fishery up. I think in a lot of cases of extinction humanity needs to be seen as a natural predator and the only way we’re actually going to keep those animals alive is by storing them in a stable artificial environment. I think a lot of things that will probably piss off a lot of people, because I’m not very romantic about the idea of keeping the Earth and its contents in stasis. Life changes. Extinction is an indication of that change.

But mostly I have a problem with the face of activism because I’m not an altruist. I don’t have any invested interest in sacrificing my time telling other people how to run their lives. I’m only really concerned with mine, and that’s something I do care about a lot. I do recycle, compost, and I save electricity when I can. Thanks to an entomologist friend of mine I’m keeping a close eye on the progress and possibility of entomophagy (can’t wait to take the plunge and eat my first bug) as a protein substitute. I set aside extra time when I drive places so I can roll down hills. I’m really excited about the possibility of investing in solar power, and I’m setting aside a wad of cash I’d also like to spend on books to make sure it gets done. I believe that as a core principal the idea of renewable energy is a good one, not for the environment, but for the individual. The problem common to fossil fuels isn’t only that it’s destroying our planet through the accelerated process of chemical breakdown and energy release, but also that it’s destroying the idea of liberty by making us increasingly dependent on centralised resources. Here in The City we’re run by sole-shareholder corporations acting under governmental direction, and we’re viewed as clients when taxes come round and citizens when they can’t serve up their merchandise. I imagine a city where governmental services are considered a secondary option, with our primary reliance on home generators and resident-controlled water storage. A world where we’ve taken these matters into our own hands so we don’t have to get petitions and media awareness and deal with every civil worker strike that comes along every few months. We’re fighting these wars as a collective because they affect all of us, but they affect all of us because humans have given up on the idea of independence.

And that is the real crime that’s going on. There’s maybe a handful of people with Think for Yourself written on their placards, only a few dozen who don’t want you to join their movement but start your own. You want to talk about conservation? Let’s talk about the schizophrenics and the hyperactives and the delusionals who are being drugged into placidity by those who fear madness. Let’s talk about a generation bred on jingles and catchphrases, who’ve learnt advertisements like flashcards for a pop-quiz test they’re never going to take. Let’s talk about the needs of the many, the thoughts of the many, the opinions of the many over the lives of the few.

You want to see extinction? I see a world where ideas are dying in favour of quick quips and memes. It’s worse than poaching. It’s something viral, something stupid, something pithy that laughs as it goes, devoting its time to amusement and comfort. The cessation of thought. It’s hard to grasp because it isn’t physical, but I know you know what I’m talking about. You can see it around you at a party when no-one’s sober and it’s all mumbling and giggling and blank stares, and swaying to the music, but nothing else. You can see it across from you when someone’s messing with their phone instead of talking, because these days you just change the channel if you don’t want to see something, or because they’d rather be invested in something they can switch off if it rubs them up the wrong way. Hell, it’s something you can see in yourself because you do it too, and because you’re always sitting there with your emotions and assessments, trying to look your coolest, trying to work out what people think of you, trying to feel good and sexy and uninhibited, trying to lie to yourself and say you don’t think about that stuff. I think all of us feel these things, but only a few admit it and resist it. The rest just want the comfort of unity. Completion.

I’ll tell you now, I don’t want to be comfortable. I want to constantly break down and spill out and explode, because that destruction is proof that there’s ‘something’ inside of me to destruct and it’s what I see rapidly depleting in outsiders. I am an activist, but I’m also a tiger shark, a white rhino, a panda bear. I’m fighting for my right to exist as an idea. Even in the certainty of an artificial world. Let’s be straight and call it a zoo.

What people don’t realise is, it’s the same thing. That battle they’re fighting and the one I am. They both start with awareness. An awareness of what’s happening to the world, and later, the awareness that they are responsible for changing it. Then comes the divergence between my kind of activism and their kind. Because on their level they’re still trapped in the world of memes and petitions and union strikes. They’re still a centralised movement, with everything depending on oneness and community and a single governing body, with the idea that acting as something complete and big and faceless they will have the power to save the whales and the starving poor and the sinful youth of the modern age. And it has about the same effectiveness as our electrical providers, whose power blackouts are legendary.

If you want to save the world, please just go home. Switch off your radio so it can stop telling you to save electricity. Stop buying fish and cow meat and cook an organic, bug-filled meal for you and your friends. Stop looking at funny memes and cartoons on the internet, put on some music and draw something, write something, make something yourself. If you expect your neighbours are poachers, kill them. There are several useful guides on how to do so online. Destroy the corrupt and plutocratic film industry by resorting to data piracy, and put the money you’d use to watch movies into a clean energy fund to improve your residence. Flush your meds and learn to live with yourself and your nature. Never stop being aware of the problems out there in the world, but never rally under the banner of power or community. Just have a few good friends, maybe a cheerleader or a gypsy or a cowboy, who expose you to what effect you’re having on the world by what you do and do not do.

This is not a banner. This is not a cause. This is one small placard reading Think for Yourself. Take from it what you will, and carve your own sign into yours.

Intelligence & Education

Intelligence: The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Education: The giving of intellectual, moral, and social instruction.

When I think of intelligence by itself, I think of Good Will Hunting. You may know the movie – a troubled young janitor working at a university strolls past a classroom and solves a mathematical equation that has been placed up as a challenge for a class. When they find out it’s him who’s solved it, he’s taken in by mathematicians who would use him to solve their evil sums, and placed under psychological analysis to find out why he has criminal leanings.

In short, he is intelligent, but uneducated. I think people end up in this sort of a position out of two primary causes. The first is that like Will they didn’t have the funds to engage in modern sophistry, and valued a line of credit above a line of candescence. They end up using their intelligence practically, improving the efficiency with which they perform their job, interact with others and in drastic cases simply survive.

In the second case, and one common throughout history, an upperclassman will believe education to be beneath them and forgo it entirely, with much the same result; the generation of a character that resists authority figures while being confident and adroit with anything they choose to undertake.

As for education, it is something of the standard in society. Intelligence isn’t equal to everyone. Some are born with it, or learn it quickly to survive. Others – most people, I think, likely including myself to one degree or another – aren’t intelligent. The only way they can hope to become intelligent is to be taught to be so. Maybe that’s possible. Recent breakthroughs in neuroplasticity research suggest that intellect is pliable and can be honed with practice. But it’s still frustrating when you know you’re trying your hardest and you still come second to someone who is naturally intelligent, as is likely to happen continuously throughout your life (so get used to it).

The point being that for most people – young people anyway – the focus of their lives is on the reception of education rather than on the application of their intelligence. Average people who tend towards scholarly-mindedness get so caught up in the quest to become intelligent, and as with many such quests they do nothing so much as define their own lack of intelligence in doing so (much like people who troll after recognition show desperation as their chief characteristic, and those seeking self-esteem look to everything before the self, which is where they eventually find it). I’d propose that learning intelligence isn’t so much about following another person’s example of intelligence, but in learning to maximise the potential of it that already exists in the student. Guiding the pursuit of their interests rather than enforcing a curriculum upon them.

Naturally that’s simply a meander into the question of method. I’ve heard it expressed that a curriculum is nothing more than a field study in aspects of intelligence, ergo Mathematics = Logic; Geography = Systems; Art = Abstraction; Sociology = Emotions, and so forth. It’s a very interesting theory, but to be honest I never really understood why we departed from the idea of universalism. We needed specialists, I guess. Whatever the cost.

A person who is educated but lacks intelligence is someone who has access to an instructive mind but cannot absorb or apply the teachings of that mind and fashion from it an original thought. Essentially, a follower. A disciple of this sort never learns to become independent of their tutor – whether that tutor be a book, a parent, a professor – and follows its example only along known paths, unable to apply anything beyond their curriculum. In many instances this isn’t totally bad – a good teacher can impart a wealth of ability to a receptive student and make them into quintessential researcher or agent of their philosophy. But the prime lack they will always suffer is in stepping beyond that, learning to build their own ideas by treating the teacher’s knowledge less as a method to work and more as a material to work with.

When these two function together, we are left with what I like to think of (with fond memories of Albus Dumbledore) as Brilliance; a blend of the unorthodox, of humility, of a willingness to learn and a willingness to teach. For many people this is the ideal standard. I certainly envy it, and aspire to it.

I think that when these two fields fail to mesh we have two very special kinds of people coming to the foreground. One, as said, is the disciple. The disciple is obedient, willing, stays the course and deals within the workings of that course even when they fail it or are declared incompetent.

The other is the rebel, a being who acts against its teachers because it envisions a different, better way to do things. The trouble with this is that with the wealth of information available in the world their attention can be drawn away from their goal. In a word, they are ‘undisciplined’. This means that even though their intelligence can be steely and exacting, they are unaware of the potential it holds to change the workings of the world beyond ordinary life. Often they even end up stabbing those closest to them with it. A good teacher and possibly the only teacher a rebel will ever be able to respect (all others are most often seen as subordinate and cumbersome) is one who has the benefit of a third element, now defined:

Wisdom: Having a show of experience, knowledge or good judgement.

Wisdom is like the opposite of born intelligence. Someone can have ability and skill as a born function, entering the world stage as a parvenu among its elders, quite their equal in the matters teachers try so desperately try to enkindle in the young. But no-one (or very few, psychically apt gentlepersons) is born with experience of the world, of the nature of love and death and the changes in perception caused by time. In this regard, even an intelligent rebel can be stilled and brought to genuflexion. They can learn to trust the judgement of the wise, not being taught what they already know, but being taught the pursuit of what no amount of intelligence can ever teach. That’s what we fail to recognise sometimes. Learning isn’t all about accumulation and application. It’s about surviving the consequences of a world where accumulation and application – In selves and others – fail us.