Reflections on:
Yearly Plan 2017
while sifting through the content of old pen drives I came across an article I wrote about ten year ago, dated 31.12.2016 and titled "Yearly Plan 2017".
So much has changed in ten years... I want to tell my past self, hang in there things will get better. I can't share the whole article because it is a bit too candid. Still I thought I might share some quotes from it. #HFL
Best philosophical / political quotes
“I can live in a world without Socialism (and no God) but I can’t live in a world without right and wrong.”
“Human beings must not be saints or tyrants.”
“Morality is chiefly something to regulate our own behaviour and not to order around other people.”
“The government of a free country does not decide what is the truth and therefore what is moral.”
“There has to be such a thing as objective truth, if not then Journalism is nothing more than misery porn and frothing at the mouth in righteous indignation.”
“There is no such thing as natural justice, at any rate in this world. So we make it for aesthetic reasons.”
“Just because the world is unfair that doesn’t mean that rapists, child molesters and murderers should be our rulers.”
“The temptation of faith are very high but I don’t want to be a cowardly opportunist.”
“Literature cannot change the world for the better.”
"However this doesn’t mean that all virtue is virtue-signalling."
"To blow it all to kingdom come, or not come, either way it’s-"
"The British government is planning to create A National Database of the Fetishes of Her Majesty’s subjects."
identity / self-awareness
“I am a cliché.”
“The self-effacing and the self-aggrandizing are not mutually exclusive.”
“Extreme diminutiveness is a sign of immense greed and arrogance and hubris.”
“I am getting tired of role-playing the writer.”
“I always keep holding up England to unreasonable moral standards and she always lets me down.”
“I can tell a lie when I see one and I can call an injustice one when I see one, but even if I go on eliminating lies and injustices I am left with too many things to choose from.”
"I am too arrogant to take the hand that tries to help me if there is nothing I can give in return."
aphoristic / concise lines
“A good epigram is better than a mediocre novel.”
“It’s either utopia or it’s nothing.”
“An end with a horror rather than a horror with no end.”
“Human solidarity is enough when co-dependence is not enough.”
“The only mode of existence is the aesthetic mode of existence.”
“Word count isn’t everything.”
“Some things are not just symbolic.”
“The more I dislike something the more real it is.”
vivid passages
“The carnival aspect of it all, the show, it’s getting boring, a dreadful long party, where guests are taken out at random to a firing squad… It’s like people are living in a loop and pretend not to realize it because other people are pretending not to realize it.”
“I must cram every work of art I can get a hold of into my cranium in this limited time.”
“When you have gotten used to all of this maybe death isn’t so bad assuming that there isn’t more.”
“It will take a few dozen decades before I get through everything I want to read… Consequently I might as well just hang around.”
young /intellectual/ in crisis
“Orwell was right.”
“Can you fall in love with a dead writer?”
“I don’t want to turn George Orwell into my go-to self-insert protagonist in my self-empowerment fantasy.”
“I am too fond of ‘the man’.”
miscellaneous
"The self-effacing and the self-aggrandizing are not mutually exclusive, in-fact extreme diminutiveness is a sign of immense greed and arrogance and hubris. Making it a virtue to recognize how lacking in virtue one is and then wallowing in self-loathing, drowning in guilt while being intoxicated by self-pity. The acolyte or the hermit that rejects every earthly desire shows that his greed is such that it cannot be satiated by anything earthly so he settles for nothing or deludes himself with pure wishful fantasies. It’s much easier to get sick of people and things than you might think which is exactly all that these men have achieved, nothing more."
There's more but these are some of the more mild ones which I felt were not too embarrassing to post. My thoughts? Well, a lot has changed. For one, George Orwell is no longer a great author I look up to as an ideal. He's just an alright essayist.
In general I have become more tolerant of myself and of others, because I am more fine with myself and others being selfish with their desires. I don't know if I am totally fine with reclusive people who ran away and take snipes at society, but if they can shut up and not act like they are superior.... no even if they act superior I just don't care about what they d0. More than anything I have become more pragmatic about things like faith. Namely that without faith in one's self it's hard to have courage because reason alone can't give you enough certainty. And that the way to create faith is through auto-suggestion and repetition of both action and thoughts.
Not every problem I had in 2016-17 has been resolved, but, finally I feel like I am on the right path to be decisive and resolve things one way or another, and have the strength to be fine with the outcome of my choices based on my chief desires.
As for the spectre of politics haunting my writing like a bad miasma, I do fall back into bad habits from time to time but politics is no longer a key aspect of my identity. I have lived through too many political disasters since then, and yet come out the other end alive, so I do not regard it as be-all and end-all subject of art or my thinking and writings.
[ This paragraph is an aside about internet safety: Of course, I would have said that politics is just a side-show back then too but given the time I spent listening to political podcasts on a certain video sharing platform, I certainly did not live like that was the case. I may have become both more conservative and liberal at the same time. For example, I can say "I told you so," about the online safety act and other changes which have occurred but I have seen change and I have seen life go on after it, moreover although I believe I have gained more than lost through the internet, I don't have much sympathy for the corporations who are being regulated either. Still I am the same person, so at heart, I cannot say I believe in neither official state-management of the internet or in the oft repeated mantra and panacea about how parents should be in charge of their children's internet usage. To be frank, now that it's all in the past, for me the internet was the best escape from the control of adults; so ultimately it doesn't matter to me if the role of the controlling adults is played by the state, parents or corporations. Ideally I believe in those policies which put the control of the lives of people in their own hands as soon as possible because that's how you create independent adults, but I am also aware that we are all susceptible to influences of others, especially children, and so there needs to be "sensible defaults" on these internet platforms which disable features like infinite scroll, short videos, algorithmic recommendations by default. The difference between me and the current social reformers, is that I believe that anyone should have the right to enable those features one-by-one if they so wish. All intelligent children wish to some extent be treated like adults, and it is because they can't be taken seriously offline that they turn to the internet where age doesn't matter as much (for now), of course they cannot fully get that wish to be treated as adults, but I don't think ignoring their agency like this will lead to their proper development. #InternetSafety ]
In any case, I have abandoned writing purely self-reflective writing like this because writing likes this goes in a loop and does not lead to much action. Still this article I wrote on the last day of 2016 was a tiny step, a start, or even a prelude to a start to my current actions, and I couldn't be here without those so I am grateful I indulged in these sentimental writings. For the time being I will back them up somewhere so I won't lose them and clear my usb pen drives for other uses. And from now on I would rather put those emotional words into the mouths of fictional characters than mine.