Showerpress

I purposefully ignore many decisions because I feel that doing so is most honest to my ‘true’ self.

“Are you progressive or conservative?”
I choose not to think about it.
“Why are you wearing that?”
I don’t know; fashion doesn’t concern me.  Cause it’s comfortable, idk…

I wonder if I’m making a mistake.

It’s impossible to choose freely what to wear, who to ‘be’.  Because every day we stand, walk, talk and act in ways which are patterned from some personal or culturally imposed decision.  So when I say “I don’t decide to act in a masculine or feminine way”, all I’m really doing is ignoring the pre-made decision.

In other words, if you are blind to the distinctions of performance, you are not free but merely unaware of your own entrapment.

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Of course my ignore-ance is not simply chosen out of personal philosophy – it’s also a lot less scary if you take much of your personality and function as just ‘natural’.  We become free from responsibility. For if you accept the true extent to which our personalities are performative, you are confronted with an overwhelming multiplicity of choices!  All of a sudden even getting up in the morning becomes a tremendous mess of an affair.  The clothes I pick aren’t free from cultural assumptions because I’m not aware of those assumptions in the first place.

The truly free people must worry endlessly about what everything means and implies, before their freedom can be reached.

Perhaps you doubt ‘freedom’ as a concept, and suggest we are always subject to culture and influence. This is true in a way, but better to be aware of it!  At least then we can decide which bits of culture to accept, and which to rebel against.  The question is whether it’s possibly to become, over time, totally aware of all that we represent – not to other people, but to ourselves.  To clarify; the performance is not for the benefit of other people, it’s essentially a personal performance.  To understand “personal performance”, we must look at ourselves as defined by two processes, the ‘performer’ and the ‘critic’. The critic reacts to performance.  To be a balanced person is to perform to your own critic, to act in accordance with your own values.  To be true to yourself.

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Back on track: That I am unaware of my own assumptions and judgments does not mean they don’t exist.

What happens if we begin to believe that? A flood of anxiety; we become petrified of everything, no longer able to trust out instincts.

The solution might be to become more aware.  To accept that i am no more ‘free’ from culture’s binding than your average hipster, is the first step, the revolution.  The second is a slow awakening, a gradual focusing of the world where I start monitoring my life. (If you are more emotionally developed than I, perhaps this is second nature.)  It sounds pretty unpleasant; a constant awareness of every action.  I guess that’s what results in social awkwardness.  But oh, it’s worth it in the end!  Because after some indeterminate amount of observation and understanding, the mess begins to pattern.

That pattern is culture.  Now the person who partakes in this journey has their own set of values, borne from society yet separate from it.

So we are each of us confronted with a choice.  To make do with the ‘one size fits all’ assumptions of others, or to tailor-make assumptions for ourselves.

So what are the differences between the two, and what are their respective merits and problems?
Personal morality;

• Requires time to mature – maybe the mistakes made during that development are ‘unacceptable’ – best to wear an ill-fitting shoe in the meantime, than forgo shoes altogether.
• Might suggest a world of anarchy, where no group can ever unite because of slight personal differences.
• Is however, the only real choice.

Nobody is happy with someone else’s decisions – equality cannot be maintained on any level whilst we accept that as premise.  The shoe will never fit.  Is it worth the self-sacrifice, to suffer from bad feet for the sake of easier shoe-making?  My own morality and politics suggests nothing is worth the sacrifice of individuality.

Morality from culture;

• Is more easily explicable and understood.

In other words, can be assimilated into a single person’s control and thesis.  The only system academics will ever accept is one which they mentally own – who would dare stand for a system they cannot understand?

This is why the fight against patriarchal totalitarianism – on a global political and personal emotional level – must be a fight against reason and understanding.  To understand something is to reduce it to an impositional framework of morality.

In accepting this, what results is a curious mentality which rejects any system that appears understandable. If this sounds stupid, think about it for a second: A political system should include everyone.  Therefore, belief in that system implies an understanding of each individual encompassed by it.  Do you claim to understand everyone?

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Scientists say; “okay so we may be wrong in some respects, but it’s an improvement on knowing nothing at all”

All this talk of understanding and knowing is based on thinking.  Well how about a politics and philosophy based on feeling?  Is that a contradiction in terms?

To be really audacious; the enlightenment gave men freedom to think for themselves, what we need now is freedom to feel.

Because just as thinking was underestimated before – or seen as something only suitable for the upper classes, the men – now feeling has been neglected to ‘Art’, to ‘women’.

Nobody takes feeling seriously anymore.  Listen to a politician respond to natural disasters.  Their speeches have been carefully thought over, checked and approved and performed to the world.

“What’s the use in feeling bad about something?  What matters is action, to respond promptly and efficiently”
That practicality has its place.  At the moment, it threatens to consume everything.  Obama couldn’t stand up and cry as a political response – because this is “useless”.  Ahh, useless…

We truly are IF’s in an ET world.