When I made the resolution to write blog entries more often I thought tzopics to write about would come up and suggest themselves from everyday life, thoughts and things I hear and read about. Especially because I don't impose any rules on what is worth publishing and what isn't. I was right. Topics to write about come up all the time. But I didn't expect my idea of what I deem worth writing about to change so much that I feel shy about writing about anything. It is something I should have expected because it happens over and over. I've published shitposts with a sentence or less, then tried to only write interesting things for a while, then nothing for a long time - over and over. I think it's like a cycle I go through with varying speed. But I don't always intuitively know at what point of the cycle I am. But now that I try to write here regularly, I notice the periods where I don't write anything because nothing feels interesting enough. I intend to not care about whether what I write about is interesting. But I keep forgetting that I intend to not care.
Sometimes I think about a topic that can not be explored in a simple blog enty; or a single book; or by thinking about it for a year or five. Whenever I get into a conversation related to such a (often philosophical topic or one essential to human coexistance) I get a boost from new input, other view points, relativisations or new idea. I might feel intrigues, challanged, disrupted, supported or something else; and from the new input and the thoughts they lead me to in the following days and weeks I get a little bit closer to being able to write a book about such topics. But I would never.
The more I advance into society acting as a normal human being the more people talk freely to me about their beliefs, fears and ideas. And the more I get exposed to ideas that could be described as outside of my world view. And the more thoughts that I categorise as philosophical get fueled by foreign ideas. It's not often that I genuinely think about such topics deeply enough to get to have new thoughts, ideas or even beliefs. But most of those times has been in the last couple of years. Second most times were when I was around 16, 18, maybe 20 years old and talked to friends about pretty much anything freely and naively. I wasn't afraid to to weird out others. If they took offense by my thoughts and ideas (I didn't practicve having beliefs until much later, I believe.) I'm sure they henceforth avoided me or something. (I wouldn't have consciously noticved at the time.) Nowadays it takes the exact right situation plus a fairly large pile of motivation to steer a conversation to a point where fundamental political or societal topics (such as radical or controversial ideas) are accepted as a topic. What the motivation is may differ. I think it's good when convincing somebody of something is not part of it. But when you have ideas, that wish is hard to suppress. It usually at least peaks to the surface, be it only in the form of somebody saying that convincing somebody of something is not their intend.
This entry probably could do with a lot more structuring. It's one of those where I know that there's something that I want to say. But I don't exactly know what it is until I've built dozens of sentences. I think I'm going to just not re-write this entry and see if it makes sense anyway. I bet it will, to me.
One of my greatest desires (Good thing that "one of" can mean almost any number of desires as long as the total number of existing desires is not defined.) has always been to understand those world views that clash with my own. Experiences and beliefs that contradict what I perceive as reality, thought processes that are clearly not rational, beliefs that seem like they must have come from incomplete or wrong information and societal goals that don't line up with what I always come back to assuming to be what's best for society intrigue me. There is a lot of room in the latter, of course. And I'm not one who reads books to get the complete picture oif everybody's world view. I don't know what Nietsche really went on about for so many pages that those that made me loose my interest in reading what he had to say. I don't tend to read what religious fundamentalists on a mission tell me to read. But I peek into all sorts of stuff. I've listened to long lectures/monologues and conversations with Jordan Perersen on YouTube (before he got onto his current, rather close-minded, path of publicity work). I've listened to recordings from a weirdly praised guru (what people call a guru nowadays) and, and I give weird film, music and writings several chances before I really file them under "not for me" or "too weird for me" or "well, I'm a data hoardewr, so I'm not going to delete this, but it doesn't feel great that this is on my hard drive". Mein Kampf is much much more abstruse that most people who haven't read it believe. But it is in good company in my collection of bits. But most importantly - in my current belief - I use chances to talk to people who say things that are "out there" or contradict basics of my world view. When a clearly clinically ill paranoiac came to the hackerspace asking for help in securing his system, I was the one that bought up the patience to show a Windows user how to set up his firewall in BSD. (BTW, I really believe that I'm not trying to boast here, or something. This is just context for the next paragraph, I think.) I've spent many hours discussing spiritual topics with a person who confidently states that she does not want to trhink rationally, because rational thinking is against what she feels to be true. More than once I've ended up discussing politics with a right-wing skin head when I came for a anti-fascist counterprotest. I'm the one who stays when a (watch out, pigeonholing ahead) smelly drug addict asks everybody at the bus stop if they can do a web search for them because they wonder what colour snow is in Australia. I feel solicited when a magazine titles with "Psychology of the Evil". Because I want to understand: How other people think, how basic assumptions can be the opposite in another person's world view, why their normal is so different from mine, what information they base their beliefs on and - if it's the same information I have been exposed to - especiually how they can come to a different conclusion.
Recently I had a talk with somebody who I know also tends to explore different various extremes when pondering over questions of humanity, the coexistance of different types of beings (brains, humans, species, things). To my surprise they drove the converation to question many things that I assumed as given necessities of human wellbeing. Without being specific (for reasons the beginning of this entry may or may not have explained well), I was presented with reasoning and detailed explanations of thought preocesses that lead to conclusions that contradict several of my core beliefs including the assumption that humans generally consider well-being (happyness, satisfaction) as something that is desireable, if not the main goal of the human existance. I like to believe that many things were said against the sayer's belief in order to breaden the listener's horizon or field of thinking. But the fact that I don't know what ideas were shared out of a liking for open-mindedness and free thinking and what parts were shared out of conviction powers many of my late-night trains of thought since then.
Maybe (very probably) I'm interacting with people who would fierely disagree with me, if not hate me, if they knew my political opinions. I'm in contact with so many different people for work. The fact that we get along on a professional level despitze our differences could be food for thought in itself. I am glad that I don't know their political views because it would distract me way too much to try to understand where they're coming from or why they're so wrong while believing the opposite to be true. But I cherrish those moments in which I'm led to undertand parts of the reasoning behind world views that are very different from mine withoput feeling like I'm being guided or steered to such an understanding. I don't want to risk being manipulated into a realisation without taking all the necessary considerations into account.
I think the main reason why I wanted to write this entry is because my mind is still blown over the fact that I could now probably (in principle) rationally advocate for a genocide for the benefit of humanity.