(By the way, this is my first entry since my site host Jimi installed Movable Type 4 here; it should mean that all aspects of the site are now working again, including the feeds, archive pages and more. Sorry it took so long to fix this!)

Regular readers know that for the last several years, I've been spending more time by myself than I have at any other period of my life, because of a series of small things that have been happening all at the same time: because of losing a lot of my former friends in the early 2000s, for example, because of being mostly unemployed these days and in no financial position to go out much, because of most of my professional work anymore being done online from home, not at an office with co-workers. And when you spend such a larger amount of time alone than normal like I have recently, you can't help but start understanding humanity in a way you didn't before -- from a different perspective, if you will, kind of like seeing your home country in a different way after visiting another country for the first time.

In fact, this has been somewhat of an ongoing emotional struggle I've been dealing with this year, in that when you do have new understandings about human behavior based on sudden new large periods of seclusion, those new understandings tend to be pessimistic ones (i.e. "I'm starting to understand how humans can be so incredibly cruel and violent towards each other"), with all that time alone turning one in general more bitter, more closed-off from the rest of humanity, less able to relate to normal human concerns. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because of being able to feel this bitterness and seclusion do its work on me, and because of it not being something that I want to have happen -- I don't want to eventually turn into "Old Man Pettus," living by himself at the end of the block and with everyone else terrified of him, working some profession like used-bookstore owner that allows him to continue being a clueless grumpy little prick 24 hours a day, without ever needing an excuse to act otherwise.

What I've been doing very recently, then, is thinking about these depressing new realities concerning humanity I've been learning this year, and trying to turn them on their head; to understand how those realizations can also reflect good things about humanity, and how this new awareness of how humanity works can be used for productive purposes as well as the usual destructive ones. I know, I'm not making much sense, so let me just get right to the heart of the depressing realization I've made this year, which will help illustrate my point; namely, that apart from actually hitting each other with sticks or whatnot, all other ways that humans interact with each other is based solely on those humans' willingness to let that other human affect them. So, that is, anytime someone says something that hurts your feelings, it is solely and completely because you've let that person have the power to hurt your feelings; that if you choose not to care what that person thinks, there is absolutely no way for that person to affect your physical and mental well-being, short of picking up a stick and hitting you with it (or punching you, or stabbing you, or throwing a cocktail in your face, etc).

Yeah, I know, it seems at first like a simple realization to make, something that certainly doesn't require years of being cut off from humanity to realize; but just think of all the ways this truth about human behavior affects our daily activities, even stuff we never think is influenced by such a thing...

--The fact that we bathe on a regular basis, for example, because we care whether other strangers think we stink or not;

--All the times we don't launch into tirades against strangers in public who piss us off, merely because we don't want the other strangers around us to think of us as some kind of maniac;

--The fact that most of us don't go around talking to ourselves out loud in public, merely because we don't want strangers to think we're crazy.

In fact, the more you think about it, the more you realize that the entire concept of "society," of "civilization," is predicated on this behavior; of the majority of people in that society voluntarily putting caps on their most outrageous and disruptive impulses, because for some reason they care what a million other completely random strangers think of them. This is what keeps most people in a society, for example, from going around punching whatever strangers happen to piss them off on any given day; take away this inexplicable worry that most people have over what other strangers think of them, and society itself would immediately and completely fall apart. After all, this is why we label sociopaths as "dangerous to society," even though technically it's simply one of a myriad of valid ways to look at one's fellow humans; because sociopaths really don't care what any other human thinks of them, and therefore not only behave in the most unimaginably cruel ways possible, but also with nothing that can stop them, short of hitting them with a stick (or locking them away, or pumping them full of drugs, etc).

That's why this realization has been so depressing to me this year; because it's a realization of just how fragile civilization in general is, much less an enlightened liberal society like America was from its founding until 9/11. You come to realize that the reason Bush happens, the reason Hitler happens, is because of too many people in that particular society being the opposite of sociopaths; of not standing up to "evil" behavior, of not standing up for what they know to be ethically right, because of too big a fear of what everyone else will think of them for doing so. It's the great social contract that makes up society, you come to realize: the one radical end where you do anything you feel like at any time you want, the other radical end where all your actions are done for the betterment of the State, of the status quo, and the balance between the two that all of us have to find for ourselves. If you have too many people in a society on one end of this spectrum, then you have constant chaos and violence and civil strife; too many at the other end and you have fascism, with a couple of bullies in charge and millions of others who simply tolerate them, because they don't want to make waves.

That's the really depressing thing about all this, of course; because the next logical conclusion after all this is that everything going on in America these days is stuff that deserves to happen to America, that it's karmic retribution for a nation of soft, lazy, uneducated ethical pussies, the result of a tidal wave of history that's no more possible to stop than a physical tidal wave is. After all, situations like Bush are self-fulfilling ones; that if the majority of Americans were willing to think for themselves, were educated enough and smart enough to understand the issues of the day, then fascists like Bush and his cronies would've never gained power in the first place, would've never been voted in in the first place, much less be able to strip away such a profound amount of civil rights without the general public making any kind of fuss. The very fact that the American public has allowed this to happen means that America deserves to have this happen; that Americans deserve to have their rights stripped away from them, deserve to be ruled by an iron fascist fist, deserve to have their right to privacy and a fair trial and everything else taken away from them, deserve to be slaughtered in massive numbers in far-off lands. There's no point in protesting these things, no point in trying to fight them, because it's the great forces of history you're seeing at play, and there's simply nothing that can be done about them; that much like Germany in the 1930s, the only option left for truly smart and freedom-loving Americans is to simply pack up and move, to slowly and sadly watch that home country fall apart from the distant safety of Europe or Australia or Asia.

Yeah; FUCKING DEPRESSING AND BITTER, like I said. And also like I said, an attitude I don't want to have; this defeatist, weasely, nihilist little shit attitude, this attitude that screams, "The world's going to hell and there's nothing I can do, so I'm just not even going to care anymore." Like I said, too much time viewing the world this way is what turns you into Old Man Pettus, a situation I'm trying as hard as possible to avoid, simply because it messes with so many other areas of one's life -- with the ability to run a business like I'm trying to do these days, the ability to date (hell, just the ability to find other people attractive), on and on and on and on. In fact, that would probably be the first response I would have to those who have chosen to permanently adopt the bitter attitude I've been talking about today; that when such people ask, "What's the point of caring, anyway, when society is falling apart and deserves to do so," the first thing I would say back is, "There's a difference between what's going on with a society and what's going on with you, enough of a difference that you should care."

This is what the Taoists teach us, after all, as well as many other Eastern philosophies; that in a world of infinite sin and chaos, the only thing one can do is worry about oneself, and to live one's life in the way that one ethically knows it should be lived. If every single person did this, the Taoists argue, then we would need no laws and no religions in the first place, no police and no armies; the world would naturally be a place of perfect order and peace, precisely because each individual is accepting responsibility for their own life and behavior. And that even though such a thing will never actually happen, there are still a lot of benefits to acting in that style anyway; at least your own life will be calm and happy that way, despite whatever's going on around you -- and you never know, you might just inspire some others around you to live that way as well, bringing the world that much closer to that ideal state the Taoists pine for.

This is what I mean by flipping the situation around; that instead of sitting around saying, "It doesn't matter how I treat others, because it doesn't matter what others think of me, and the world is going to hell and why should I even fucking bother," you always have the choice to say, "No, wait a minute, it does matter what other people think of me, and it does matter that I care. It matters because that is the very definition of humanity; that without it, humans are not much more than six-foot-tall cockroaches, who have no other purpose on Earth than to fuck and eat and shit and die." We need to care at least a little about what society thinks of us, and whether we're getting along in society or not; like I said, that's the very way we create a society in the first place, is by finding a balance between the two extremes, not by floating to one end and grasping on for dear life. That in a world where radicals are running around every day, getting away with the most ridiculously inhumane things because they literally don't care what their fellow humans think of their behavior, this is how we differentiate ourselves from them; by giving a damn what our fellow humans think of our behavior, by stopping and thinking about what we're about to do, and whether that would be considered monstrous or maybe even simply wrong in the eyes of others.

The reason to act "good" is merely for the sake of acting good; because it feels good to act good, and that's why they call it acting good. The reason to act good is because we admire others who act good; because when we see someone act selflessly or with sincere regard for complete strangers, we think with fascination and respect, "There goes a better person than I." And we should be striving to be those people, to be better humans than we are; because that then makes us better humans, and it makes our time on Earth more meaningful and more significant. These are the kinds of things you can counter with, whenever you're feeling down about humanity like I've been feeling this year; they are the things you can remind yourself of the next time crazy ol' Bush and his pals strip away yet one more American freedom, torture yet one more "enemy combatant," hire yet one more unaccountable bloodthirsty private militia to do the work our armed forces are supposed to be doing, as a way of circumventing the laws regarding these groups' actions. It's been helping me feel better recently, helping me start integrating myself back into humanity; I urge frustrated Americans to spend some time thinking this way themselves as well.