Anthology of the Self - Entry XII
Twilight of the Ego - Dispelling the Myths of Facticity to become Beautiful Objects
This is the twilight of the ego. It is with a heavy heart that I inform you all Charlotte and her many traits, projects and treatises are done and dusted. I have cracked the code of labels, the great disparagers, the great reducers, bringers of shrinkage. I mistakenly referred to us as a bubblegum reality. Hell is other people, after all, and what is hell but a violation of the sacred. I failed to understand where the Bubble is, who the bubble belonged to, and this was my greatest slide into bad faith.
The answer is that we bear no bubble. We can enact our will in the bubble, deem the flow of air in, the idiosyncrasies of its swell. Yet, as soon as the pink leaves our lips, protrudes from our flesh, it ceases to be of consequence to its creator. What a grand error this project has been operating under. We must understand two things before you, too, can implode your self with a grin on your face.
1.) First, all labels must be externally prescriptive. A self-assigned label is utterly useless unless certified by the other. I can believe I am kind, but this is a delusion. Kindness stems from the judgement and acknowledgement of an other. This much is obvious, but I go further. We can be called kind a thousand times, but still to internalize kindness as a tenant of our character is utter delusion that immediately rockets one out of authentic behaviour. As soon as we are swayed or accept the prescriptions of others unto our self, we fail to perform this trait genuinely. As there is no objective understanding of kindness, we are not kind. Kindness is relatively understood by every individual who deploys it. The word, in singular use, is utterly meaningless besides to gesture at the positive outcomes of your actions. I am told I am kind by an old woman in the morning and by a young man in the evening. We must understand that we were not, at a fundamental level, deemed kind twice, only on a linguistic level. Perhaps the young man was abused as a child and takes all favour as kindness. Perhaps the old woman has taken up the phrase “kind” out of a jaded thankfulness for how society accommodates her age. Perhaps there are others who ruminate on what entails a kind act, others who were pampered and grow recalcitrant to niceties, making kindness a much higher standard. Subjectivity defines the weight of concepts both in deployment and in internalization. Internalizing “kind” as a trait of your being is utterly incoherent from the actual reality behind the intent of the language. As far as is worth considering, we performed two positively received acts and are of a temporally kind bubble.
Further, there is the point that at all identifying with the outcomes of our actions is, too, delusional. It is sickeningly unknowable how we were perceived without acknowledgement, and one mustn’t ruminate on this, but it is our greatest human weakness that we want to know how we were perceived. Pride and envy hinge on an advantageous perception, the denial of which will compel us to maddening affectations. We act as arrogance-informed badge collectors, where we seek a positive feedback loop for all we do and are only chemically incentivized to do good. When the chemical becomes our guiding principle, there is especially no identity behind the positive act.
However, even in the case of the non-chemical, we only deny our freedom if we default to a prescribed label. Prescriptors are far too often objective. I am kind. I am an impressive writer. But “being an impressive writer” is bullshit, as it seems to suggest I am incapable of a shitty piece of writing. At the very least, it suggests I am capable of impressive writing, but “impressive” is a) empirically and b) externally defined. We can’t call ourselves impressive, as “to leave an impression" or “affect the conscience” of oneself is just thinking. The only place we are an “impressive writer” is in the determinations of the other, which are abstracted from our reality, and thus useless to us. As soon as we identify with a label, as soon as I tell someone who has not read my writing that I am “an impressive writer”, I am only externalizing my delusion. The act of marketing oneself by reducing to language is utterly outside of reality. It’s not sickening because it’s a reduction, as I previously expressed, it’s sickening because it’s a fabrication with which we are sleighting the other and making determinate the indeterminate social fruits of our being and performing in a space.
2.) Second, and following from that, we can’t hold any labels within ourself. This may be humanity’s greatest side-step into bad faith. It’s been instilled in us since childhood to hold consistent truths about ourself. Hell, the entire genre of word, adjective, exists precisely for our own ego and judgement. Adjectives have betrayed us!
This is not actually going to be an attack on adjectives, but to say no adjective ought to mean anything within and in reference to oneself. The uptake of an adjective is a baseless denial of all outside of the adjective. The greatest fire hazards in Self City are misprescribed labels. I am a happy person, one will say, but they fall into a great depression shortly after saying this. The issue here is not that they are depressed, but that they have made their default mode of being happiness, and as such, all states of being which are not framed with happiness are suffocating them. Depression arises completely naturally regardless of the extent and identification with happiness. Those that most effectively cope with a depressive episode are those who accept the chameleon nature of mood, or those who try to get to the root cause instead of deluding themselves that one state is naturally how they are and one is not. All emotions are reactive, reactivity is determined by environment, and environment is not the self.
But this goes further. It is not just moods, not just traits, but we must understand that every self-referential word is unfounded in the self. Our name, our gender, our race, the features of our upbringing, our political position, our core values, our everything, is internally incoherent and haphazard. I am not anything. There is nothing I am. There are things I can be told I am, treated like I am, and thus inform how I am, but those things are not me. Thinking, in terms of the self, in language, is an inherent act of self-oppression that denies our freedom and misattributes our facticity. I am not Charlotte, I am called Charlotte, thus as far as I am concerned, there is none of my identity in Charlotte. It is merely a pointed referral by the other to target my mind in a room.
Positionality plays an interesting role here because, as is, there is an inherent social othering present in our physicality. My skin is white, but I am not white. However, as I exist socially, how I am treated is informed by my whiteness. I am treated better by means of being white, and it is worth being attentive to my unequal treatment. Yet, if I identify as “white”, I am identifying with the social facticity of unequal privilege as is, rather than the physical facticity of my skin colour which ought not deny, internally, my volition. The collective treatments of whiteness are not, in fact, facticity, regardless of how factual their social outcomes are. We are all being dismantled in our potential by perpetuating collective over physical facticities. Language, again, has been delusionally internalized upon ourselves in the direction of others that is not coherent with the reality of their physicality.
One might argue, then, where we are not at the point yet where we can abandon all prescriptive terms, as we need them to demarcate the inequalities of binary oppositions, but I disagree. It is the language itself that houses these binaries at a conceptual level that needs to be dismantled. We use words in a manner that represents much more than the objectively-outlined assertions of a dictionary, as demonstrated earlier. We cannot intake any language as indicative or following from our actions, we can only react to and press the words bestowed upon us. Words are an abstraction of facticity packed with the weight of individual and collective histories. It is by words and the uptake of assertions that the woman becomes feminine, that the person of European descent becomes white, that the person struggling to make ends meet becomes poor. The understanding of white, poor and feminine and their burdened assertions do not at all follow from, and idealistically ought not inform, the being of an individual.
But they do, and I restate, this is our greatest side-step into bad faith. All language others, all adjectives are understood in a binary, and thus to accept any of it upon ourselves is to suggest that there is someone out there that is not like us or that we are in some way exceptional with regards to being worthy of being prescribed a trait. This is a fast-track to kill our self, to utterly succumb to the machine. Power oppositions were a mistake for everyone. Social egalitarianism is good for the market, good for our well-being, good for the function of society. Yet we are determined to denote our own superiority and inferiority in all sects of life. “I’m bad at math” or “I’m an impressive writer” are deluding us out of our own egalitarianism.
We deny not only our self existing outside of these language constructs, but others. Language, as is, is often only prescribed in edge cases, as if everyone is “kind”, no one is. Thus, to be called “kind” is to hold power over all who have not been deemed “kind”. By the nature of how we deploy language, we hold kindness over these people if internalized. Power corrupts, and thus I conclude here, hold no label. To prescribe is okay, as it’s empirical, a compliment. But to internalize, especially while unaware of the source and the baggage of the word, is only to confine ourselves to a false facticity.
One final concern with my egalitarian ideal here with a vacant referability of self is the question of assimilation. The deployment and internalization of a unique set of labels informs a more interesting individual. One who is affirmed in their silliness or kindness is more likely to make it a pattern of their physicality. Again, I disagree. We live much of our life in mockery of other people. We can observe what traits we find admirable, and as our experience of living is subjective, as are those we deem admirable. We can act morally and act uniquely without calling ourself unique and moral, and so in such a way. Our essence cannot follow from our past essence without betraying us. We are incentivized to act in a way one might deem kind out of a want to do good in a moment that doesn’t follow from “I’m a kind person, and I ought to help out here”. The inner story is more authentically you if there is no language or core value in your head by which all decisions are dictated. All actions must stem from our perception and initiative, not out of duty to live up to our self. You are nothing but your present action, and while we can detest our present action, it can’t be on the basis of not living up to our constructed ego. I reject that one should be capable of reconstructing their self on paper, not that their behaviour still won’t tend towards patterns. It is the process of unbecoming into the box of a word by which the self becomes non-egalitarian in their motive for presentation.
A good example of this is the superhero. They perform morally good actions because they have the strength to alleviate suffering, and thus enact their will on perceived wrongdoing to grant charity to the disempowered (ideally, at least. Batman and The Watchmen tell us otherwise). However, there is also the supervillain, one who has the same power, but uses it to create suffering out of a sadism or disenfranchisement with the world. In facticity, both the superhero and supervillain are identical. It is only in the internalization of titles off the morality of their actions that distinguishes whether they are a hero or villain. Hero and villain are collectively, societally defined, so to deem yourself one or the other is to deny the possibility that you could easily slip into the other role by mere perception of morality in your action. The superhero stops a train to save a man tied on the tracks. In stopping the train so quickly, however, a couple of it’s passengers die in the collision. The man tied to the tracks calls you a superhero, but those aboard the train will call you a supervillain regardless of the outcome. By identifying outside of your facticity, you are deceiving yourself that you can be both, that you can slip onto the other side of the power through mere subjectivism. Of yourself, there is only the external. Jesus idles at a green light too long and is called an asshole. The only thing prescriptors speak to is to affirm or deny your present action. Thus, they hold no weight beyond the temporal, even when routine.
Now that we are decidedly empty, let’s build the self back up again. As Descartes will tell us, there is definitely a thinking thing, but there is more than that we can lay claim to while still not denying our self.
The brain is a crucible. The self is a mere cauldron boiling sensory inputs together into a delicious stew. The produced stew is not the self, but the very capacity for unfurling the world is informed by what ingredients are already in the pot. Every stew tastes distinct, and the most beautiful lives are composed of a wide array of quality ingredients. It is the self, to a degree, which dictates the ingredients (phenomenons) worth adding (internalizing), and the self who acts in accordance with nurturing a specific taste profile. This taste profile is irreducible to words under the mere quantity of ingredients, and can only be understood and interpreted by the crucible. The self is a sensory, arguably aesthetic, reaction to their own facticity, and the capacity by which the flavour can be adjusted, not off the internalization of the other, but off whether they can stand by the outcomes contributed to from their own angle. The other remains a mystery, and while we can taste their stew, one’s own stew will always be the touchstone by which they evaluate other stews. The prescriptives of other crucibles is thus intangible to us in its literal source of critique or praise. While our stew will always taste foul to some, it is in the best interest of the crucible to not hand out soup that is, by their own judgement or through collective disdain, foul-tasting. When criticism is mounting enough, we still ought to be thorough in evaluating sympathetically our own behaviour, but we must understand we mis-stepped rather than identifying with the disdain or take it as a mark against the collective evaluation. All taste is subjective, and so long as the crucible can stand by their own soup without delusion or acceptance that their flavour is solidly good or bad since it was prior, we will all be making our own idiosyncratic soups in peace from the other crucibles.
Alternatively, the self is a camera! A camera on wheels granted, but a thing that is recording at all times in directorial pursuit of something. For some, we want to produce the most beautiful movie and are motivated to act by naught but our capacity to find beauty. Our camera has arms by which it can manipulate its surroundings to achieve beauty, and of course makes movies with sound, taste, smell and texture. I think all of our actions are out of an artistic desire to make the movie we want to make. Some see accruing a budget as the way to make a cooler movie, some see hitting the books to create a scholarly movie that can tie together it’s plot threads into profound moments, some see bumming around and the grunge of the carnal as a thrilling setting, a short run-time with a live-fast-die-young mentality. Some build serene films within the status quo, a slice of life where there is a sense of comfort in going through the motions. Some build burn-it-all-down movies where they make a martyr of their film to do something impactful. Of course, some are so bound by their conditions that they don’t have the freedom to direct their own film, but still the film rolls, but still the life is lived, but still there are ups-and-downs, but still there are moments of brilliance.
Going outside becomes a lot easier when we see people as directors trying to play out their vision or crucibles of their own soup, at least for me. There is a sense of comfort in knowing the limits of the power we hold over each other’s films and stews if we discard the power dynamics of language. There’s no malice, no judgement, just projects going about that sometimes interfere with your own, or projects you don’t understand, but projects nonetheless. There is no greater bond forger than a family dinner or watching a movie, as both are magically, sensually, identical. At this moment, we’re all eating from a pot of spaghetti, all dedicating our faculties to immersing our self in the life of an identical other. Perhaps our takeaways are different, as our projects and taste are subjective prior, but all is developed, within that experience, on the basis of something identical in facticity. There’s something beautiful about that. What a human is substantially is such an abstract concept, but there’s something definitively real and unifying about a film or a bowl of stew, something we can all understand even if our tastes are different. I like viewing people as cameras, as it doesn’t assert onto them the intent of their film, just the active process of film-making, and ideally, a love of the product. As long as there is a love of the project, a sense of being the director within the limits of your facticity, there is no more one needs to be, no more traits necessary to be asserted or prescribed onto them. Leave each other be with your language, let them cook and play out their vision, but don’t be afraid to make their film a little prettier, their stew a little sweeter.