ex movere

I wrote this introduction and mission statement as Ex Movere’s first post, but I’m realizing it’s not getting the attention it needs to do it’s job and qualify the motivations of this author. I’ve instead promoted this statement to a page in itself, in hopes that it receives more exposure and better illuminates the trail I’m trying to blaze with these words and ideas.

Dear Readers,

I have started and abandoned various journals before, but the thrust of those blogs were really about my personal life. One of the major themes I ignored in those previous blogs was the element of living. I’d talk about what happened, or how I felt about what happened, but I’d leave out entirely the wealth of analysis that comes as a package deal with me. I’d give you the who, the what… but skip the why, and in the time I’ve been on this earth I’ve only ever really been pursuing the why.

For those of you who might subscribe to this blog, I’d like to qualify this author’s perspective: I want change. And I want change in this world – at the very least I want to be convinced that change is happening, change for the better, change for the future. Today and yesterday, I am not convinced. Tomorrow doesn’t look inspiring either, at least for the moment. I see a counter-culture movement that acts wildly to raise ‘awareness’, which is well meaning, you do need to name it before you claim it, so to speak, but awareness alone isn’t helping. You see movies like Fight Club pop up, arguing, “Hey, maybe just stockpiling random consumer goods in my house is a waste of time and there’s more to life.” Or Little Miss Sunshine comes along and points out, “Wait a second, dressing my kid up like a barbie doll is probably going to compromise the next 70 years of my child’s life!” But whether you’re a poignant novelist or director, a lobbyist or an activist, the message is missed by the masses.

This is not a problem of awareness. This is a problem of responsibility. Your average citizen doesn’t watch Fight Club and toss his couch out the window in disgust – he either doesn’t get it at all, or he glosses over it, saying “That’s an awesome movie, what a great argument. This director/writer really has a deep understanding of the problem – good thing it’s being handled by someone else; now I can go back to watching Dr. Phil.” And the guy who didn’t get it was never taught to think for himself, thus missing the point entirely.

The scenario I just described does not assert that it’s a conscious choice. An active decision to sabotage one’s life. But it happens, it is happening everyday, and this attitude rejects responsibility – both the potential responsibility and the actual responsibility. If someone makes a movie like that, and it’s a human cry, from one soul to another, screaming “Please! You spent two hours taking this in, you’re interested enough in it, think about it! Think about if you’re capable of grasping it, and capable of passing judgement on my idea, and if you agree… help me, please!” We make excuses, we look to someone else, to a faceless committee, an arbitrary law, a senseless ritual, a preconceived idea we set in stone. We created an entire branch of education to record and pass on what has already happened in our world and to learn to then think critically about that history and learn from our mistakes as a people.

Why then are we so unwilling to think critically about our present?

We are burnt out, tired of the monotony, the repression. We step outside and start applying level after level of perceptual filters – one filter to block out all the advertising, one filter to block out our conscience telling us to not eat pizza for breakfast for the third day in a row, another filter to block out how meaningless and fruitless our jobs are… the list goes on. We instinctually feel a certain way about a certain fact in our lives, and just set a portion of our mind to constantly, actively, tune out that nagging voice. By 4pm, we’re cooked, we can’t handle another minute. We turn on the TV to replace human contact because we spent the whole day convincing ourselves we’re crappy humans and nobody would want us, adult children with jobs that make no sense, crushed by the belittling feeling that the world we live in is bigger, stronger and smarter than us and therefore if it could be changed for the better, someone else would have done it already.

Someone else would help if they could. Always someone else.

That’s a bleak story, but it’s only one example. It’s one perspective, it’s one perfectly valid reason to give up. We all have that reason to give up, our own stories, our own feelings of childlike helplessness and inability to make a tangible impact. We convince ourselves that it’s all we can do to just cope and keep going – no time or energy for something bigger; we’re still at the first couple of tiers of the pyramid, worried about food and security. After thousands of years of human civilization, this culture asks me to believe that we were meant to live like this; exhausted, squabbling ants, deprived of a real human experience and a structure of reasoning to ground our opinions and self-image.

Again, I say no, for the 10,000th time, even if I am the only one who hears my voice. I say NO!

I want to change this world from the ground up, and I have actively set my soul and my will to this end for as long as I can remember. I want to educate parents to reorganize the priorities and the values being passed onto their kids. I want to restructure the education system to adequately inspire and provoke our youth; to teach them to think, to question, to really learn and connect with their world on more than the superficial level we exist on now. I want more thinking and less doing – more theory and less action.

Zen is not sitting on a fucking mountain and humming. And living is not running around from task to task. Be present in your life so you stop reacting to and interacting with life like a goddamn physics equation, governed by instinct and routine.

This seems counterintuitive to our culture; every action has a $ value, every second has it’s worth in pennies, so more action means more value out of life. But we’re regressing as humans under this regime. And I do mean under; crushed by it’s omniscient presence into every facet of our life. We built something that was all action and no theory, and we can’t control it, so the goal has not become ‘to live‘, but ‘to survive‘. Not surprisingly, this mirrors our behavior dealing with a teenager acting out – we never gave our child a sense of morality grounded in anything, a sense of reason that our actions were just, a consistent perspective and confident role model, or punishments to accurately fit their crimes.

Not surprisingly, when raising a teenager, we are just trying to survive – the mood swings, the fight for independent control, the belligerence, the arbitrary self-assurance. We aren’t living and loving our parenthood, taking ownership of our responsibility to both our child and ourselves. We’re doing ‘the best we can‘, and just trying to make it through.

When your teenager starts kicking and screaming for themselves, that’s the hardest part. That’s when you’ve built something you can’t control the old way, the way you always used to. But it’s still yours, you still brought it this far, and it bloody well still needs your love, your guidance, and your volunteered effort. She’s out all night with scary boys, he’s taking drugs to relieve himself from reality, she’s had three abortions because she keeps defining herself through her sexuality and he swallowed a bottle of pills because he defined himself through his love. This is where our kids are at, this is where WE are at, this is where our WORLD is at! I feel we’re more than that – I am more than that. I made damn sure I’m more than that, and this attitude has put me at odds and well outside the margins. This raging and petulant world is screaming at me that it knows better, and it doesn’t. I love my world, and it wants it’s own space now, and humanity is rolling over and giving up our responsibility to guide this tyrant through these hard times.

“It’s too hard! We didn’t know it would be this hard! Of course I love my kids, but they don’t respect me, the individual, anymore!”

“I had a right to have kids, so I had them, and when they were small and orderly they were bliss, but now they’re out of control and I don’t know what to do!”

All action, no theory. This is a direct parallel.

We brought civilization to this point, and now it’s all about survival. Our world turns, thinks, breathes and self-perpetuates it’s feelings nowadays, 24/7, every day of the year. And we’re parenting it badly. We set poor examples, with no consistency, with no rationale, no logical foundation, no framework of priority. We do not prioritize the sense over the nonsense. And because of that, we suffer. We suffer emotionally, we suffer spiritually, we suffer psychologically, we suffer philisophically. We suffer tragically. Poetically. And it doesn’t have to be like that.

I want to help. I don’t want to raise awareness to shit we see every day and intuitively understand – I want to re-educate our public about WHY we need a WHY for WHAT we do.

From the minute I wake up, each and every day, I am tormented by the enormous and sickening gap between where we, as a people, as a community, currently are… and where we truly could be. I am tormented because I never tune it out, I refuse to; the senselessness of life, the random and deplorable, the sickness and rage and filth, the apathy and the hunger. The hunger not for food and for security but for life – I hear the gasping screams from beyond the veil, begging for an actual human connection and a real, unguarded emotion.

We qualify our lives through quantity. We decide what should be based entirely on what already is.

“He’s a millionaire.” “That’s how it’s always been done.”

This doesn’t feel right. There’s something fundamentally wrong with assigning ourselves numbers, and Hume already pointed out how impossible it is to move reasonably from an is to an ought.

I’m not pointing fingers. This world is wrong, and it’s none of our fault individually. We were born into this. We’ll probably die before it’s fixed. I don’t fucking care who’s fault it was that started this mess, or who’s currently working hardest to perpetuate it. The problem is that the world is dying because we’ve spent all our vision and resources trying to figure out how to exist for 90 years instead of just 30, but haven’t spent two weeks working on what to DO with that existence. We just do; we forgot how to be.

This blog will (hopefully) take a critical look at some very random subjects I get inspired to grapple with. This is a forum for violent philosophy – I want to stare some moments down, call them out, ask how we feel about them and what we think, and where the hell we should go from here. This is forum for aesthetic appreciation, in every sense. This is a forum for emotion guided by reason, a venue for ideas to bounce and dance and exist all on their own for the sake of being had. Ideas are very much like people – they have a conception, a birth, a parent that usually loves them unconditionally and tries desperately to make sense of them, and the ability to touch other’s lives and leave a mark in this world. Their souls, like ours, are timeless and raging, asking more of us than we could ever reasonably offer, and giving more in return than we could ever deserve.

I don’t pretend I am going to know what the fuck I’m talking about in the coming posts. But if I don’t, I hope you do. And if that’s the case, I want to hear all about it. Don’t read me quietly, if you can at all help it.

Sincerely, and with passion in my heart,

~ Driz