Thinking Unenslaved

this job/contract-hunting scene drives me nuts. this little voice that has hung around me for 40-odd years tells me i should have been more patient where i was at and taken the woefully lose-lose situation i was in as some sort of challenge to improve myself or some shit.

amazingly, i do manage to refrain from bashing myself in the head.

my best lead right now involves waiting to replace the guy who’s currently fucking up that position right and left. he apparently needs one more major screw-up, then the two people over there i’ve spoken to will push me in front of their senior vp of professional services. i’m not normally one to root for someone else’s failure—not even in sports!—but it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and from where i’m sitting, there just ain’t enough dogs.

that’s a quote from somewhere, i forget where. meh.

read more: focusing the unfocused

Yes, I know, this blog is supposed to be about freeing oneself from mental slavery, and ironically, the bulk of my efforts here to date have involved the stuff we do on Twitter. It’s funny how that works, yes, but there’s a reason why it’s happened that way. It’s not just my own mental slavery to Twitter, but the several types of mental slavery that essentially equate to gainful employment and taking my job seriously.

All of which changed last week when I resigned my position. I’m not terribly thrilled with the prospect of having to choose between restarting my former business (19 months ago, I quit 16 years of self-employment to take that job), or putting my head back on the chopping block known affectionately as “job hunting,” but it was exactly this concept of mental slavery that prompted me to leave. I’ve never been totally thrilled with the idea of playing by the rules, and when the rules are written by people who really don’t understand the paradigm, following those rules becomes even more bogus.

And that’s about all I’ll say about work. They’re good people, but the industry they serve will hopefully go away with national health care reform anyway. My own bitching and moaning about our health care system was a bit duplicitous on certain levels.

Anyway, late last Thursday and most of Friday were spent in reflection on the various things in my life for which I have forced myself into strict and/or linear ways of thinking. I don’t have a set rule or methodology for this kind of self-analysis. Partly, it’s a bit of compare/contrast with similar past experiences and also between the various things I have going on right now. It’s also just a general assessment of where my mind is at, and how the thought-patterns I use when I’m teaching could be applied to other situations. In short, I discovered several aspects of my life weren’t exactly being approached in an unenslaved way, and that was quite frustrating for me. I try to be holistic about these things. They’re not just good ideas, you know.

Ironically, one of the most enslaved ways of thinking I believe I undertake is this belief that I don’t have time to blog. That’s really just not true, but I make it true, since I don’t take the time to do this very often. See where I’m going with this thought? We make our own realities; we enslave ourselves in these ways. At least, I do, but I really doubt I’m alone. But we do this all the time, in love, in activities, in all sorts of things. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time to do a thing when really, we’ve simply put other things first, or we want a rest, or….whatever. But since we repeat the lie of “not enough time” to ourselves so often, we believe the lie, so “not enough time” becomes real.

Which, of course, is quite easy to say, now that I do have the time. Except that I don’t. I take job-hunting pretty seriously, and when it’s done right, it’s like the most time-consuming job there is! Nevertheless, I’ve resolved to blog and vlog here more, hopefully with a semblance of consistency, because I do have several subjects that I want to communicate on. The trick for me will be finding a new job, or a set of contracts For example:

1. The…er…stigma of the word Atheist and how that simple word halts communication with certain mindsets
2. Getting people to understand that Agnosticism is not, in and of itself, a final conclusion
3. Working together with people who subscribe to disparate beliefs to affect social and governmental reform
4. Beginning to turn the tide of perception of those Atheists who work in the public sector, into a good thing. Away from the not-so-tacit ‘requirement’ that public servants be religious.
5. Remembering the works of freethinkers, humanists, secularists and atheists who have had a profound impact on our culture

Those are just a few of the things I hope to undertake here in the upcoming weeks. I will (hopefully) no longer hold myself bound by this get-nothing-done mental slavery.

Peace.

Earlier today, I tweeted: “they protest in the streets, on rooftops. chanting their devotion to the very faith that enslaves them and from which they beg deliverance.”

This is a thought that has been coming upon me for several days. Even with all the Twitter support for new elections in Iran, or at least a full recount of the vote, we are forgetting, if not simply outright ignoring, that the populace, in large part (even if proven not to be a technical majority), does not seek emancipation from its theocratic republic. All this outcry is, instead, the expression of a desire for a slightly more emotionally digestible form of theocratic rule.

Another way of saying that is: The protesters in Iran don’t want freedom. They are simply demanding that the shackles be loosened slightly so that they can scratch a philosophical itch or two.

And that, really, is it.

After some considerable consideration (pardon the redundancy), I changed my twitter avatar from a green one (Green is, as you might remember, the official color of Islam anyway), to a regular one a few days ago. In retrospect, I don’t support this Free Iran charade at all. Because it’s a charade. It’s pompous blowhardiness. Sure, if the elections were rigged, that’s wrong. Undoubtedly, if votes were ignored or uncounted, that’s wrong. But the desired end result is far too closely related to the status quo to be worthy of this much angst and bloodshed. How incredibly, unfortunately, disappointingly…

…ignorant.

“Save us from our self-imposed delusion with a slightly different form of self-imposed delusion” is precisely what this is all about. That ain’t freedom, friends and neighbors. That’s self-perpetuated willful enslavement. Iran will only begin to be “free” when the majority requires the government to remove the yolk of religious oppression. And it’ll still be a long way from there for them to go as a country.

And it’s this faulty, delusional presumption that makes the senseless, needless deaths, injuries, and property damage all the more depressing.

Humanity: the perpetually incessant bane of human progress.

Yes, “unenslaved” is a metaphor.

I have no delusions, illusions, or conclusions that the type of “slavery” I refer to when using this metaphor in any remote way correlates to the various forms of tribal, racial, and societal forms of slavery which have been committed upon people throughout humanity’s inglorious history. By using the word “unenslaved”, my intention is not to demean anyone who is, or has ever been, subjected to the crime we commonly refer to as slavery.

That having been said, I want to apologize for the dearth of posts over the past nine days. for what it’s worth, I was in the hospital with pneumonia from June 11-15, and sick for several days before that. It was the first time—ever—that I have been brought so low, and that’s including being quite sickly as a toddler, shot in combat in Panama, and having sustained back injuries during Desert Storm, along with the relatively typical respiratory issues from the same. At 42 years of age, I’m still young enough to be grossly opposed to feeling helpless. It was not a fun week, and I’m still not at 100% yet.

Now, why my guest bloggers didn’t do anything, I can’t tell you. Lazy bums they are, off with their own domains and such! Bums, I tell you! BUMS!

Anyway, let me take a moment hear to explain what this site is REALLY about.

When I started unenslaved.com, the thoughts in my head revolved around many subjects, ranging from a simple celebration of not being bound by traditionalism, religion, and other forms of social oppression through to wanting to be a resource for people who are in the process of freeing themselves from the various forms of institutionalized social repression (which includes some forms of education, religion and sociological circumstances). Ultimately, I think I’ve settled on the former, with a willingness to help those who want it, in terms of the latter. As well, if something I manage to bust out happens to pique someone’s interest to the point that they begin to at least toy with changing the way they think, then I would be a happy man indeed. This is also why I’ve invited others to post here: more opportunities to get more neurons firing, after all.

You should be aware that I, and my guest-bloggers (at least I believe I can safely speak for them on this level), are all smart-asses, but we are are passionate about the things we have come to know as true. For myself, as a “de-convert” of original Christian upbringing, I often have a difficult time not belittling those whose thinking is woefully clouded by delusion, because my de-conversion was a function of my personal maturation process. While I have every intention of continuing my patented smartassery, I also intend to improve upon not talking like a smarmy asshat, or even internally believing that I’m “better” than someone else who lives under the veil of delusion. I doubt I’ll be perfect at it, but I’ll honestly try.

Anything else, after all, would be me imposing a particularly insidious form of mental slavery on myself: a belief that I am “better” simply because I corrected an error. Such things don’t truly make anyone better, they just make one less gullible. Just as many bad things can happen by virtue of one’s transfixed skepticism as by virtue of one’s gullibility, after all.

So here’s the challenge: I hope that those of us that blog here will continually challenge ourselves and each other to be true to the premise above: We are not inherently better than anyone else. Now, we might be better at some things than certain other people: things like critical thinking, analysis, etc. But we’re not inherently better, or more superior at least I don’t believe we necessarily are. Let us educate without belittlement, and let us communicate without condescension. I realize this is no easy task. The easy stuff isn’t really worth doing, though.

The challenge for those who come here to read these things is to at the very least attempt to be non-judgmental. You are neither expected to nor desired to agree with everything we put out to be read. You are certainly not expected to think like we do, believe what we believe, or frankly to be as self-reliant as we are.

Some are going to read that as a sidelong put-down, but that’s not the intent of that statement. Most people who believe in a deity are actually not quite as self-reliant as they tend to envision themselves. This is precisely where communications tend to get bogged down. The only thing I ask is that we make honest attempts to communicate as opposed to simply vociferating, pontificating, and jumping feet-first into the ad-hominem grab-bag of oneupmanship.

Thanks for your time.