A Fragment On Security

I don't pretend to know anything beyond a string of insights, some borrowed, some arrived at through following strands of words running on to pull them together.

One of the greatest voids in what I know is how to deal with issues of strength and power when they surface as physical conflict. While I've taken a certain thrust towards recognizing the fugitive "advantages" of striving after power, that doesn't give me any confidence that the same holds for undamaged, integrated humans either in some distant past, today, or in the future. The trouble with having blind-sides, besides the difficulty of even recognizing their existence, is the impossibility of seeing through them before our development reaches a point of clarity.

Just because the way I see power working in the world around me seems to always be a dead-end, doesn't mean that there cannot be another way of dealing with power that is beyond my understanding.

This is just one of the places where dissensus brings me hope. I don't have to know everything, I only have to know that I can't know everything, or even be able to make solid judgements on things outside my experience. This requires me to be open to what others may do, even when it doesn't make sense to me.

This doesn't mean I feel the need to be compelled into agreement. No one has that right against me as I don't have that right over anyone else. It just means that differing views are one of the ways I am reminded of my own limitations. This isn't an impediment. It's "not a bug," as they say, it's a "feature."

I don't know much beyond this on the matter. I suspect I will resist what seems to be deception. I will resist what appears to be more of what got us here, but I can't claim that even these are views that cannot stand. They exist. If I blinker myself with righteousness, I can't take them in properly whether to parse them, or defend against them, or even – perhaps in some as yet unidentified way – fight against them. What I do know is that the "normal" way these things are handled doesn't work. Suspending a reaction to them frees attention and carves a space in which some other way of seeing might develop.

New developments might be the result of my own investigations. More than likely they will come to my attention through observing what someone very much unlike me is doing. Doing something I could never have thought of. Seeing what we don't expect is much harder than one might think. Remaining caught up in the habits of consensus does not prepare us for that type of effort.