Culture may be encoded in DNA
"Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses."

...spending 8 hours in a car with my parents drives home again that am not much of a product of my environment. I'm not a product nor am I blndly rebeling against it. I'm like these birds trying to find their song. But human life is more complex than a song. And earlier generations are trying to force the laters to sing it exactly like they did. Those who still won't are either very strong or like Kafka's Hunger Artist they're simply unable to find any food that they like/unable to stand the cacophony of the song.

Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (Searching for Memory, 1996, p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence.

Kitsch shouldn't be thought of being limited to 'art'.

Kitsch is a constant (to some degree) in most of our interactions with one another. Smiling when you see someone when you're not really particularly happy to see them. Withholding negatives and pretending that things are fine, etc. Kitsch is about being dishonest; about hiding or withholding that which would make us real live human beings. Or at least ignoring negatives...

Kitsch is about saying that you're absolutely not a nonconformist and you see nothing really wrong with this status quo.

And it doesn't take a totalitarian state for it to thrive, although I imagine it helps.

What was done to art inside the Iron Curtain was awful. Here today, the concept of kitsch matters more outside of art.

But then the concept grows and maybe becomes too vague; where any selling out becomes kitsch, the second half of Office Space where everything works out just swell, etc...

I think the essential quality of being a friend to someone, of having a meaningful interaction with someone, is being able to disagree with them. To the extent you feel you can't disagree, you've got a big nothing. Just a pretend thing. Something meaningless.

It's sad to think that there are a lot of people who have no one at all they can actually be honest with. I have a few. But I want more. I want Real people. I want meaningful connections. I get sick of knowing that almost all interactions, although not based on outright lies, have an element of withholding in them.

I wish there were more people who could manage to just be honest.

But I understand that usually, in this world, disagreements result in savage behavior, and thus people are full of fear. And the way our society is set up, with the nuclear family, lemmings in shiny metal boxes, etc that there isn't enough reason for them to bother attempting to be honest with one another.

I look at my stepfather. His two daughters aren't close to honest with him. And well, to be honest, they've got some good reason to not bother being honest with him. He turns to force constantly to try to make people do things the way he wants them done. He almost never really uses reason. And he raises his voice. He yells. He will argue to hell and back over the smallest thing. For example this weekend he wants 5 of us to load into a car and go 3 hours out of our way to drop off one person instead of just taking two cars. And it's truly not worth it to not just go along with him. This time I won't bother. I'll bring some books. Just about any normal person wouldn't make a big deal about it but if someone says, 'No, I'll take a separate car." He's liable to fight over it right into a final heart attack.

It's understandable that people just want to avoid him. So that's what they do.

I have for the most part tried to not be that way. I think of Akira Kurosawa's Ran (King Lear adaptation). In which the older brothers just lie to keep out of any fight. The youngest cares enough about his father to tell the truth. The result is a huge fight with that son banished.

So have I done with my father. But in the end in Ran, the old king finds his youngest son and loves him so. I've had huge fights with my dad, given myself huge headaches where it would have been easier to just act like my sisters. Instead I've thought enough of him to act real with him. In the long run I'm the only person who he's got left that he feels really cares about him. I'm the only one who hasn't been meaningless with him. I'm the only friend he's got.

But then, he is my father. On the other hand there are so many people out there. 99.9% of them I'll have a short meaningless exchange with and nothing more. Being actually honest with them, bothering to disagree just has no point to it.

Generally speaking it's hopeless trying to be honest with people. And I must understand I'm going to go through my life with almost no one ever being honest with me.

Edit: I don't mean to make my stepfather sound like a bad person. He's essentially a man really trying to be good. He is not actually a selfish person. He cares about people very much. He's brought over 100 people from the third world to get college educations through a scholarship fund he created and runs (and donates a lot of money to from an ordinary professor salary). He's essentially a good guy who unfortunately has rightwing ideas ingrained in him. The father is the final authority on everything in his mind. And he made up his mind for good a few decades ago.

Sunday night after work while driving to my parents house for dinner I was in such a happy mood, probably mostly because I've about finished up another degree and will start a new job soon. (And will have more free time, less drudgery, more money). I'm driving to their house for dinner for mother's day and thinking I wanted to say a 'prayer' of thanks to the great sky fairy before eating, basically for the fact that here we all are still alive, having survived all these years with plenty of food and shelter. And that's about it. Happiness at mere survival.

I could spend a lot of my time like that. Jump in all the way to the mere survival game and believe it a good thing to enjoy whether I win or lose. But I really like to keep that sort of thing to a minimum. I prefer to think hard and be less happy.

This college program I've just finished up was quite annoying. Their goal is to pass a high percentage of people and then have a high percentage of those passed people manage to pass the RN exam to become certified nurses. So what they do is try to have the majority of people just barely passing for two years to keep them studying hard. They make sure a few people do fail. No matter what a few people have to fail to have that as a threat for all to keep studying hard.

A nice example is this very last test here, they don't want to fail anyone at the last moment, so they make the very last test a group test. We knew this because they just did it two months ago with the other section and two months previous with the section before... But they don't tell us this, they lie and say otherwise because they think we'll otherwise not study.

Instead of reason they've used force (fear, threats). The same as capitalism does in general. I remember in the military, where they don't fire people, they instead just scream and yell and constantly threaten to put people in jail for anything. It is annoying that this is how our society works. Force truimphs over reason the vast majority of time. Is it possible we could live on some other basis than merely surviving with such threats as being homeless, starving or in jail looming over us?

And of this degree, feh, I could learn everything I need to know and have passed the RN exam on my own with 3 months of study. Instead I've largely wasted yet another two years while constantly having the chop chop on my tail.

And this degree is one of the more practical and useful. My previous engineering degrees were far worse. And let's not even think about the public school system that came before. What a collossal waste of time. I could have just read William Golding's Lord of the Flies. (Well, OK, there's nothing like experiencing it first hand.)

And it all adds up to a ton of my life wasted. Flaming hoops for what? Mere survival. I'm arrogant enough to think I could have been doing something more useful than just surviving.

But now finally, hopefully, something more than merely surviving can soon begin. Now that my life is probably about halfway over.

(Not that anything other than merely surviving really exists.)

This idea of cultivating an imaginary muse/imaginary eyes. I wonder if the very concept of being sentient (being self aware) means having imaginary eyes. To be self aware there must be a something that is aware of a something. The one is you, the other is the imaginary eyes.

These eyes can be a very conscious thing that we pretend is a lover, friend, etc. Or among other things they can just be ourselves watching ourselves. In the latter it can be a very subconscious/unconscious process.

I wonder if this all can go too far and become schizophrenia. The imaginary eyes are really just us. The person with schizophrenic tendencies could start thinking it's actually someone else.

You can have a pretend conversation with yourself, with your imaginary eyes. But what if the imaginary you gets out of control. Starts acting on it's own. Or at least seems to be doing so. Then like one person who's got a couple of songs I really like and are linked to from this blog, your computer starts talking to you and you jump out the window.

We focus on the negative because one punch in the face can matter more than a bunch of positives. But then worse, we scan for negatives. And scan and scan. We scan the past. But what is the past, what are memories? We're not skimming through the contents of a filing cabinent. We're trying to recreate past memories in order to review them. We're recreating past events in order to scan them for any negatives. So we recreate (remember) and rebuild and here and there we remake it wrong and the wrongly remembered event now has a negative in it and we focus on that negative.

But are we remembering it rightly or wrongly? Let's try again to recreate it. And again, and again. Is it right now? What if this negative really did happen? Then what? Let's now run through an endless number of possible responses to try to right this wrong. Constantly forgetting as we go and double back. Again, and again, and again.

Now scan elsewhere, etc.

We scan and scan and create negative things that didn't even happen. Persecute ourselves, bring about a constant state of fear concerning imagined wrongs we've committed.

Fear.

And fear, and fear. Eventually paralyzing you. You must find a way out.

"Life is short!" You're going to die anyway, so shrug off the fear and live life to the fullest. Throw caution to the wind. Take chances. Have fun!

Do stupid things. Act like an idiot.

In the face of what life otherwise is, just randomly do anomic things.

Everything that is wrong becomes unexpectedly wrong and thus funny.

The guy at the 'too far gone' facility going on about what a great man Hitler was, being lewd with women, endless racist jokes, endless neologisms, and puns. He pretended during his eval to be talking to someone on a submarine on the doctor's phone. Hilarious.

But then most days he won't talk, he won't eat, he won't come out of his room. Paralyzed by his endless mistakes and overtaken by fear.