Expansive Dialogue: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

“I like resolution,” you say.

Let’s try a new way to analyze a text. Imagine each word as a symbol. It’s imaginary in the sense that it occurs psychologically (in the human brain), but don’t underestimate the power (or influence) these symbols provoke. The analogy is also the physical reality of thoughts:

Modern science explains how neurological signals travel from synapse to synapse, using the ionic binary (but instead of 1 or 0, a reaction or not). This physical process constitutes mental energy. Energy, in the broad sense of the word, denotes the potential to do work—the work to be done being the matter. Matter is energy slowed down ( .

And the work that symbols can do: Genocide. Cunt. Social Equity. Liberal. Queer. Not only are the denotative meanings constructed, but the connotative meaning (arising from context, or what the language says about the word) of any word comes from a discourse between symbols, perspectives, culture, or any system engaging in dynamic communication. Just as in science when charges repulse and opposites attract, it’s natural for ideas to materialize anti-ideas. Eventually the two ideas synthesize to relate or consolidate (like Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis triad). Our mind organizes the same way God organized the universe.

It’s important to note here (for you, dear reader) that my conceptualization of the reader is perhaps my sister, Deborah Greenspan, or maybe a close friend. I’m not famous. Who would want to read this if I wasn’t? I have to earn my stripes before I can contribute to the literary scene. I’m anxious, I guess, so that’s why I wrote this book. I write to relieve my anxiety.

(I might as well get this autobiographical tangent over with now): I didn’t always write. I, covertly, used to be atheist. One night, when I was fifteen years old, I had a fantastic dream mostly inspired by Halo, a videogame I played at the time (which was probably inspired, partly, by Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and so on forever). I never experienced anything so creative in my life. I found purpose, and that lead me to my belief in God. I kept the memory by writing it down. I finished the novelette in three months. I was impressed with myself (and got a little cocky for a while), but the added confidence blessed me redundantly. I continued to see purpose from that day onward.

Naivety is purity, a state of natural being, and an attitude of acceptance. For a dung beetle to survive on feces analogizes my argument. From a human standpoint, with our language and norms, we feel like that is gross. “They eat what we poop? Yuk.” Suppose, now, that the dung beetles, as a species, were now a Human state, with a modernized military force. If they heard our viewpoints on their dietary preferences, how might they react? Suppose they did not know at all, as the bug species does not. That ignorance for “a (subjective) truth” constitutes the meat of naivety. The beetles secure a higher, rational, “objective” truth of nature, so as to continue living and reproducing. So do Humans—although sometimes subjective, normative, relative truth of our language competes with its sound logic, in times of war.

I need to admit that I want world peace, an end to global hunger, an increase in first-generation and second-generation negative and positive human rights (life, liberty, happiness, and socialist benefits like education, health care, minimum wage, etc), and, overall, for things to get better . I don’t know how we’ll ever get there, regretfully. The world is a closed-system. The law of entropy tells us that chaos will win out. The Europeans solved their economic hardships with colonialism. Most of the human race lost, but the Europeans made out well, for a time. But where is there left to go? Earth’s moon? Mars? Jupiter or Saturn’s moons? The asteroid belts? That only solves the issue of economy. Where will humans live, now that they live so long? If we manage to rise up the poor most of the world, make places like Darfur, Sudan like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the United States, then we would need something like six more Earth’s to support our current living habits. Ending world hunger partially means Americans may end up with a slightly skimpier meal. Well that will seal the deal right there—unless, perhaps, China, the European Union, or India overtake our hegemony and decide to spread their graces. Everyone gets a chance, you see, most beloved reader (you’re like the best therapy).

I fear that we’ll get so powerful one day and make a mistake too large: something to shock or restart the system. The luxurious life of gods comes with a price: Not everyone can afford it. This leads to conflict. Nuclear weapons come to mind. So does Global Warming.

It makes me think, “What can I do to help?”

I like Thomas Pynchon’s use of entropy as an analogy in the Crying of Lot 49 . In this post-modernist struggle between a solipsist revelation or the unveiling of a conspiracy, the protagonist, Oedipa, talks to an inventor, Nefastis, who built Maxwell’s Demon: a machine to reverse entropy, or sort (organize by isolation) the energy to do work out of nothing. Quantum Mechanic’s Uncertainty Principle disproves the possibility of the machine, (since measurement transfers heat by photons, and because information transfers energy in general), but the fiction solves this impossibility by assigning Oedipa the role of conduit, or “sensitive,” as an external agent affecting on behalf of a closed-system (going back to the idea of solipsism or Tristero conspiracy). If you haven’t read the Crying of Lot 49 , I highly recommend it. (I’ll wait here until you’re done).

We need paranoid outsiders to throw new ideas into the mixing pot. Conformity will freeze productivity. We must tread careful, not disturbing the balance of ambiguity and mono-meaning, of fluid and static, of society and individual. Equilibrium between norms and personality evens a mind of subjectivity and objectivity. Liberated folks solve problems faster than restrained automatons, since their logic drains into multiple pools. Intuitively, dear reader, you know I’m right—even if you don’t agree with how I came to my conclusions. The government should help people by guaranteeing human rights, not scare them into obedience.

Conglomeration and deconstruction: the binary of sorting. One may group many elements into a vague truth, or tear apart a symbol into its ambiguity of origin. Organization in wake of chaos, order in lieu of entropy, meaning in an endless, fertile plot of information—symbols orients themselves (and us) in this relative system.