stances

i know, because i've read tons in a lot of conflicting directions, that there's no single way to go that'll make us all happy. there's no utopia, only individual notions of what ideals are and constant pulling and struggling on all sides that keeps us at all stable.

stable is when lots of us are perpetually on the edge of disaster, because that means that lots of us are getting by with bigger dreams than our realities afford.

i think lots of conflicting thoughts about ideals.

i think i'm a pure capitalist, but i see how the system doesn't seem to work unregulated even though excessive regulation is usually the problem.

i see how we don't have functional democracies and how they would screw us up if we had them, and how totalitarian governments have their advantages even though i'd never want to live under one.

i see how the education we idealize is the opposite of the education we get in our institutions. i see how our inherent fear of change brings us to choose lifestyles that we don't want. i see how all of the sage truisms we've learned are forced to the back of our minds when faced with other people's fears, like establishing status in a world of crumbling notions of society and finding work in job markets that are doomed to become irrelevant.

i see that we've already crossed the threshold into an environmental revolt, but i also see that we've crossed a threshold of our evolution in which global consciousness really has become a thing and people overall are doing well enough to be able to sit back and bitch about first-world problems while trying to solve third-world ones.

i believe that a healthy society is one that encourages risky behaviour.

perhaps history really needs to be in constant revolution because almost all of our plans suck in the long term and because every dog must have his day. it pains me that so many people must fight the world we've made in order to do wonderful things, but i'm confident that without that struggle there'd be little incentive to be great.

i see that fundamentalism is a destructive, negative force that seeks to return us to the pre-postmodern innocence that we now call primitive; but i totally get why all these "fundies" want out from what the rest of see as an awesome future.

i lie to myself when i think that i'm tolerant of others' beliefs; the truth is that i'm only tolerant of their beliefs if they don't interfere with mine. and i know full well that mine interfere with theirs.

at least, i tell myself, i'm equally intolerant of the devoutly religious and of atheists.

we can't all get along. the question of satisfaction becomes one of the kind of lifestyle each one of us desires, and whether it's worth spending the short time we have on this planet fighting for it. and whether we really want it at all, at the end of the day, because the pursuit is usually better than the achievement. i suppose it's all in how good a story one can generate.

our children will treat our hells as their homes, and vice versa. if they're going to be happy, does it matter whether they're free or educated, live above ground or off-planet, idealize peace, or continue to evolve their reality? 'cause that's just what *some of us* want.

personally? i'd like everybody's options to be kept open.