Bitter Grace

Part the first.
Part the second.
Part the third.

So where we are:
I've come to the conclusion that quite a few USians have trouble just remembering stuff. Things that have happened, past news, things like that.
And that still more who can remember things, sort of, sometimes, don't find it easy to apply them to new events or the empirical world. Like, "Is this aphorism about What Always Happens born out by the thing happening now?"
And that an enormous proportion of the population can't do processing like, "Guru Q predicted this thing would happen under conditions that have been met. Did the thing happen?"
And that it is staggeringly rare for people to remember the sources of theories or information and to treat these ideas and data as things that people have constructed or curated, and to evaluate them accordingly.
And that in this landscape of habitual limited processing people can and do think more carefully and less amnesiac ally, and even love the feeling of freedom and understanding, but that it exhausts them, and they burn out and get cranky.
And that in the United States, where we've been convinced to treat every f-ing thing as a Competitive Move for Status, this breeds a lot of aggression and dismissal in conversation. Dismissal of people who offering data as insufficiently sophisticated, dismissal of people operating at high levels of abstraction as inauthentic or sophistical or just full of shit.

And that all makes me sad and tired.

Another point now: operating as if you're deploying tactics on a conversational battlefield doesn't require the concentration, the attention, that treating conversation as a form of communication, interchange, joint exploration do. Attention is apparently exhausting, and retreat to hostility is even that much more attractive by comparison.

I not only like communication, and am called to it. I am also so accustomed to working things through when they aren't immediately obvious to me that I do it automatically. And I am handicapped by a near-inability to not-pay-attention, including to things I know are refrains of particular persons. And that combines really badly with a strong dislike of repetition.* And I not only value communication, a cooperative act, over competition, but I have competition deficits.

And that's a round-up of the discourse situation I find myself in which had me paralytically depressed by at the beginning of the month.

But am I done? Nope. Because I am tedious. I will also talkcomplain about discourse phenomena that get me the fuck down, as well as a little more about the context in which I find this frustrating.

And that should be it.


* I told Chun Woo the other evening that anyone can get me to do things I don't want to do by repeating things over and over, if I can't get away, but happily I can mostly get away.