what is your original face?

YouTube is always recommending clips of this Alan Watts character to me. He was a Brit known for interpreting and popularizing Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. Almost a century ago.

On how we push our ways on the rest of the world, he remarks that even in political styles, we enforce democracy. "You'd better be democratic, or we'll shoot," he chides. How clever he is for noting the contradiction, but then rests on that. How silly people are, right? Well, no. It's not a nonsensical contradiction, but a deception. They conflate capitalism with democracy, and then what they enforce is capitalism. They do it for the straightforward reason that it makes them wealthier. They will shoot you if you get in their way. 

It's suddenly not so contradictory. His take was just naïve. Not that there's any shame in that. Seems like there's always more to learn that changes everything. Unsurprising then that he also equates Mao with Hitler.

"If you say that you want to improve, you ought to know what's good for you - but obviously you don't. Because if you did, you would be improved."

This is exactly the sort of fallacy I'm always picking at. This presumption that the ego is somehow separate and above the rest of ourselves, in control. Whatever we know, at our fingertips to use at will. None of this is how the brain actually works. The ego is not some master controller, but more like the brain's stenographer. "If I know I'm going crazy, I must not be insane," as Dave Mustaine put it, but "knowing the path is not the same as walking the path," to quote Morpheus.

Knowing isn't necessarily enough to get you anywhere. It can help though, to understand the mechanics of what we're talking about. What sorts of improvements are we even talking about? He critiques the grim determination of jogging, "shaking the bones and rattling the brain," but doesn't understand jogging. He doesn't understand what exercise does for the bones or the brain. He doesn't understand that healthy brain function has a whole lot more to do with well-being than his ideas do.

He doesn't understand that to live is to grow. What we're not improving, we're letting atrophy. He says that we should do what we enjoy.. but what privilege it must be, to be able to do that, without it being incredibly self destructive. I might drink too much, maybe even die of alcoholism. The way he did.

"Your own nature will begin to take care of itself?" 😬

This is drivel. There is no "our own nature." There are just all sorts of reasons we are the way we are. Some more positive than others, some more addressable than others. Some we should everything do to counteract if at all possible. When you break your leg, you don't go, 'oh well, I guess that's my nature now,' but this is what we do, when we don't know what's actually broken. When we don't know enough about our circumstances to know what can be broken, let alone whether it can be fixed. It becomes magic, boot straps, and willpower. Self improvement becomes some abstract question, antithetical to your "nature," when you'd be far better served taking care of yourself.

What do I know, right? It is quite a privilege to have ideas of what makes us happy and to believe that we're living them, that we're happy because of them. I'd bet that his baseline was always about the same. The ideas were just bells and whistles. I'd prefer listening to someone fighting their way out of hell than someone pretending to have it all figured out while drinking themselves to death.