February 1, 2019.
I was a philosopher because it was the only way to be happy.
I needed to be an artist to advance my understanding of reality.
I needed to give away artwork because otherwise I might get negative karma.
People might give me negative karma if they are not allowed to see my artwork.
If I were a miserable artist I would have all my eggs in one basket.
I had to post artwork online because I needed enough karma to be a brilliant writer.
I didn't have the education to be a presenter (and presenting isn't worth money without education)… I needed to be a writer if I wanted to make legal money as a philosopher.
However, to make money like a novelist---there were no real publishers--- I had to be famous.
To be famous I had to use social media.
To use social media I had to give away things for free.
By this time I had plenty of good intellectual karma, supposedly.
But what about the other people? I had the best content, and mine was free.
Now there was no economy, and I had no money.
Where were THEY going to get their intellectual karma?
One option was heck, they weren’t set up maybe they wre automatons milling about in my subjective reality.
In that case, maybe I could be rich, maybe I could have the perfect life? Or did government subsidies mean the same thing?
Otherwise, if it were objective I sure was some kind of genius to earn all of the intellectual karma. Was it more likely they were automatons?
Or was it more likely they were equal through some unseen way?
Perhaps they were more imaginative? Then why not artistic usually? Maybe they were perverts or too advanced for that?
Perhaps they had more fun. But I know any amount of fun is great, so it seems like if people are equal they would not get far with that.
What if they were superior? Well, it wasn't obvious. Some mixture of communication and fun was my guess. But that would be more limited than fun alone if we quantify at all. That would look like inferiority.
And could they really have greater fun if they were not great?
Perhaps they were immortal?
Or perhaps they had subjective realities I could not see, in which case those who seemed greater were greater, they were just not great in ways I could see.
This made a lot of sense, because that way I could translate fun as a form of superficial calous communication of more desperate inner events.
Or, they really valued fun, in which case they thought it was the same thing as greatness, which implied they did not think greatness was useful, or they were myopically selfish.
Or, I could simply conclude my impression of greatness was subjective, in which case it was all psychological and my greatness was merely one brand of localized success, not necessarily-necessarily the best. And that's where my argument was stuck for several months, since all the rest seemed to follow or consist of dead ends. It seemed to add, I noticed, an adequate degree of complexity.
One possible conclusion was people are equal, they simply have differing taste, in which case inequality is created by bad experiences: character is all that is ever objectively superior.
Another conclusion, almost the same, is that people are equal except in regards to their preferences. Someone with a higher standard can cheat and gain advantage. But it might not be objective.
And a third conclusion is preferences are unequal, in which case one's ability to think, and judge, and formulate is what might define the difference.
Then it seemed one could be a genius concealed or not, and if everything were hard to buy, remaining concealed would be the way to give the appearance of greatness: to contain one's energy, and then give rise to something greater.
However, it was not at all clear that the appearance of greatness is what was meant by what is great.
Then it seemed, greatness was this essence we can know at our own discretion any time we will it. Those willing or unwilling are judged in their kind. Greatness is a pile of many advantages, which we may combine at our first discretion. The intellect is to know greatness. The wisdom is to test greatness. The significant is the relation of a thing to greatness.
However, it is a matter of whether we will it, and there are countless reasons to apprehend or misapprehend the will, which result correspondingly in simpler and more complex solutions and errors. This is whst decides greatness.
Likewise, the deeper we scoop into the well of possibilities, the more we find impossibilities from the bottom quarter of the well.
So, really… all true greatness is mixed with really impossible things, which require new definitions. Impossibles are possible limits.
Thus, if we are to go beyond a merely advanced definition of greatness, we must confront something similar to a paradox. Or really something that is not a paradox yet, but an unformatted possibility. The reality is formatted on the basis of what we can do with impossibility. There is no sacrifice, merely the twisting of fundamental laws present at every level. Thus the ambition of greatness is merely complexity, and its substance is paradoxy. Out of this ground of pseudo-formed and pseudo-unformed reason life and knowledge grows.
There is a sense in which the remaining humans seem a bit like ultra-lucky survivors. But there is also a sense in which ideas in particular change and grow and become more interesting. Some events like pandemics and big wars seem to get in the way of humanity’s promise, however, the structure of evolution itself, philosophy itself, and mathematics itself may undergo change, which new generations of people can at least try to appreciate.
What is disturbing is that the human chemical system may not be built for enjoyment, but merely for survival and proliferation. Thus, it may be that while new ideas emerge, new people are incapable of enjoying them completely. This particular angle makes it seem like survival is evolutionary but not inherently intelligent, or not inherently noteworthy, which in turn suggests that human languages and genetic structures are flimsy and unreliable.
CREDITS:
Stephensen, Dr. Jekyll
I Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
YYang , Valedictorian speech.
R Volkman, my first sdvisor at Southern.
Life experience.
…
Other Valedictorian Speeches:
Similar: