Peru

I am spending my second night in Pisac tonight. I don´t have the motivation to finish my Incan trail blogs right now. I´m not sure why. Maybe its because I´m still tired from my illness. More likely I think its because I´m dissatisfied with the quality of these blogs. My notebook got destroyed on the Inca trail so I haven´t really been prewriting anything. Except for in my head, where I actually can keep a lot. At least, a lot of day four is already written up there. But, I don´t know.

Peru is an interesting place. Yesterday I met some Austrians. Today I met some english teachers at the cafe I was hanging out at. There were four of them (all female=, two dutch, one brit, and an aussie. Apparently they didnt need toefl certification to get the jobs they have. We hung out on the 2nd floor of this cafe while snacking and we watched a pretty good Natalie Portman movie. One of the main characters was De Goya, and the guy in no country for old men was really good in it. I showed the dutch girls to the hostel I was staying in, and I think they got a room. Thats what meeting people like is here, fleeting. I asked them what they were doing for dinner, and the UK and Aussie said they had a host family. Alright.

Peru reminds you of its third world status often enough. Sometimes it smells like the soiled barnyard. Fair enough. Sometimes it smells far far worse than that. There are obviously no emissions requirements on vehicles, so when you find a really bad stretch of smell you hopefully line that up with a truck passing by to belch some added noxious fumes into your olfactory lobe. Sometimes it smells like plain death.

Its a good thing I didn´t come here to be enlightened. Some of you can imagine, others will have to, how many people come here with that purpose, and how many are delusional. Others come to enlighten others, to spread the word of god. Today I ran into 10 women or so who were into spiritual healing and birthing. What was so funny was that they were all dressed counterculturally. They all had combinations of shalls, cloth handmade throws, dresses over jeans, beads and crystals, piercings, sandals, various nontraditional and dreaded hair, and tribal tatoos. They talked about the energy of the group, how they were just "feeling" all these things, like I "feel" as if I just need to be close to nature now, let´s go for that hike. I felt like laughing out loud. They were into the global agricultural movement. Reminds me of plenty of people in Kingston of course, in fact, I know these people all over the place. But the sad thing was that they were like 30-40 years old, and all in a self-reinforcing group of "individuality." This reminded me of a couple of things.

One of course was recent, when I was talking to Dan about poker, how someone wins and loses. And how I shouldn´t lose sight of this fact! Isn´t a winning player impoverishing others etc. Well, this isn´t necessarily related but basically the whole save-the-world from oppression etc movement seems to me to be doing a few things. One is they hate dicthomoties. I was reading a Queen´s Journal interview with some York uni prof who used to work for Queen´s, but was too oppressed by its anti-minority environment. That and its "culture of whiteness" of course. She proffered the following quote (I paraphrase very accurately): "Its like night and day... to use that racialized language."

What? There is of course the possibility that the Journal mistranscribed "its like black and white"... but either way. How do you get off calling night and day racialized? I know where you get off, one stop before the train rolls into cogentville. People hate what they perceive as inequality to a point where they are just, quite frankly, stupid. We must rid the world of all inequality... this extends to dichotomies and comparisons of course! Nothing can be better. I wonder what these people do at restaurants.

Now that reminded me of something else, so I know not which topic to address... I´ll go with that related to the glocal agricultural people. Tim joked that he thought I might be going to Peru (another type of Enlightenment journey) to try and solve 3rd world poverty or something. While of course, I´m interested in how this could happen... notice the language I use. When people speak of trying to solve 3rd world poverty the way that phrase is, leads into the idea that there is a solution, or some solutions, that can in fact be put in place. Read: imposed from the outside. Sometimes systems reach a certain state without outside interference. I think I´m becoming aware of ways in which "this could happen", my previous phrase. Elaboration maybe for another blog, but that is something to think about. Of course those who don´t understand what someone means by "the market" or someone who thinks 3rd world people to be as stupid as they are are disinclined to believe in a system changing states without interference. They usually don´t think in terms of systems or nonlinear possibilities anyways, or havent tried to.

Anyways, that gets me to one last thing. And of course, those who disagree with me will be given various options to critisize my position. The first being that my arugment is made short and blunt -- therefore it must not be considered. The second is simply not thinking about it honestly.

There are a bunch of people, in my life and in the marketplace of ideas, who make arguments like "maybe my truth is different than your truth" or "my idea of truth is different than your idea of truth" as well as, my favourite "couldn´t it be the case that something is and is not"? The last principle is that of excluded middle in logic, and some wish to deny it could be the case. I believe most definitions of the law of excluded middle are not not P = P , with the corrolary that not P plus P = 1, something like this. Anyways, to treat the anti-law of excluded middle people first. This isn´t an assumption. People believe the law of excluded middle not on faith, but on argument. The argument runs pretty simple: if something is red, isn´t it red? yeah, if it is blue is it red? no i dont think so. It blue is not red is not red red? well if blue is not red.... ok I won´t bore you further. Taoist, various new age spiritualists, and more importantly, people who don´t want to lose arguments or concede points, say, oh but it is truth and not truth, it is life and death, night and day, and they ramble on incoherently. When it comes to actual propositions, the times the law of excluded middle doesn´t imply is the times they want it to. By that I mean they apply it selectively, to certain philosophical arguments. Why? Because they don´t want to lose an argument, concede a point, or entreat an option. The degree of niceness with which someone points out you are wrong is not correlated to its factuality, just your acceptance of it. More importantly, these people are hypocrites, namely, because they haven´t been killed crossing the street. Is the light green and not green? I should walk anyways because Im here and not here.

Sure, continue to claim you aren´t convinced by the law of excluded middle, conveniently, in those areas where its application might lead to a logical objection to something you either may believe, or may have sympathy for not pointing out to others shouldn´t be believed. Just don´t expect anyone but the credulous and similarly unreflective people such as yourself to do the same.

On the first point, that of "my idea of truth is different than your idea of truth." I think I´ve come up with a really easy, really effective, test, to determine if someone is just talking bullshit when they talk like this. Insert the word "red" or "bacon" in every spot where you find "truth". If it reads the same, ie: the argued characteristics of red and truth are duplicated in langauge, then we can suspect the person is simply playing a language-game to win an argument, or atleast, not concede a point, lose an argument, what have you. "But my idea of red is different than your idea of red, and how can you tell me my idea of red is the same?" "You can´t go around telling people, you know, making arguments, that seem to tell me what I should think about the colour red." What is a language game? Well, let me put it this way, its like when a 5 year old repeats "Why?" to every answer someone gives to a question. Is the 5 year old on to anything? Not really. Besides, some circles close themselves, unbeknownst to 5 year olds and those barely passing an intelligence equivallency exam.

Maybe here is a better exposure of this type of bullshit. How can you tell me I am not a giraffe? I, Gareth, am a giraffe! Don´t tell me otherwise.... you can´t tell me ...anything! Basically, again, what this boils down to is the person not wanting to face an objection to a small set of their beliefs. They don´t want to hold that set of their beliefs to similar tests that they hold everything else in their life to. Why? Because they said so. They don´t think this way when crossing the street though, and I can prove it.

Continuing in the bullshit department, Im making a fair amount of headway with Heidegger and Sartre. There are problems with the Heidegger text I chose, its the first English translation made of the work (1965), though the translation is of the 7th German edition. I hope this accounts for some of the difficulty I am having in reading it. While reading about 40-60% of the time I understand what he is talking about, and have the expected reflective thoughts, the other 40-60% of the time I am thinking "what the hell is he talking about?" Most of those things I have understood are interesting. I know of at least one thing, fairly conclusively, that is just superfluous. The language he uses makes me lean toward this thesis with respect to much of what he is saying, but I will hold off for the moment. There are some ontological and metaphysical insights already... as far as I´m aware the entire book is ontology and metaphysics. But, he sure writes abstrusely, and that is a demerit in my book. Of course, with him and Sartre, I have not read either Husserl, or Hegel, in advance, who both influenced their work a lot. I have read Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Kant, Doestovesky, Descartes, etc, though so I´m not without reference.

Sartre is much more understandable, perhaps up to 90% on first read! For a text of philosophy that´s pretty good. Unfortunately he could not keep up the pace of his first few pages that I detailed in an earlier blog. The work is 700 pages... so this would have been hard to do. He´s fallen into the category of many great philosophers for me at this point, where he has a lot to say of value, but a few things he writes of are demonstrably false. His metaphysics, I think, might just be total bs, not in that it isn´t true, but in that he makes it out to be more than it actually is. Bad faith though, is a concept I was aware of before knowing the name, and a concept of Sartre´s I knew before I read him. With that being said, I´m fairly impressed by the idea still (disclosure: I´ve held it myself to be the case in people for a long time), and he elaborates on it well in the book. Bad faith is basically someone lying to themselves about what they are doing in life. But lying is not an exact term, as Sartre mentions, because lying implies one knows the truth. I lie to someone that my favourite movie is Chariots of Fire, but its really Pulp Fiction. This is different, since they are fooling themselves in a way unknown to them (until the moment they realize it of course). It is the active suppression of their own essence, to play games, to maintain appearances, and idealizations. Sartre gives the example of the prudish woman, but the person who isn´t honest with themselves seems to me, to be everywhere. Anyways, Sartre seems like a Descartes at the moment, they have some good ideas. And there isn´t anythign wrong with that. I think they´re kicking me out of here... but this is where I go when I get homesick!

Best

Gareth