On First Thoughts
Essay 18
I have just received a startling revelation—a revelation that may reveal to all future people a most startling subtlety, so rich in insight that it would be deemed a treason by all reasonable men if it were to be shunned forever, to languish and decay with the passing of time, and to eventually become blotted out with the eventual death of the one who bore its secrets. This revelation is that of the first thought man has when he has given himself enough time and leisure to let his ambient mind wander through the fields and valleys, the hills and mountaintops, the rivers and seas of his unconscious thought.
Man is always struck most strongly by that which initially presents itself to him; and so, it is incumbent on him, if he wishes to write in a manner that is most true to him, that he follow that path of reason he laid out for himself without his consent.
Man becomes nothing if he lets himself pass by his most gracious gifts. What is within man's power to conceive is also within his power to bring about through right reason, habit, and routine.
The writer is the strangest of all creatures in that sense: for he actively seeks what his unconscious delivers, and it is only when he ceases to manufacture his profundity that it comes to him without struggle, with great alacrity. And suddenly does man become overwhelmed at the bountiful offerings he receives from the muses, or nature, or sensation, or recollection, or privation, or depression, that it is difficult for him to organize and form such an influx of ideas in a manner that resembles anything coherent.
In such a state, one knows not what to feel. Gratitude only goes so far in this scenario, for such ready apprehensions disappear like smoke in the wind; and likewise, man must still struggle with taming the amalgamation of sensation and experience his mind has brought to his attention. It’s easy to thank a good fortune and quickly forget the feeling its privation plunged you into, which is precisely why I don’t seek cultivation in thoughts; rather, I let them come from within me, like a flower, when the moment is ready for me.
I will never be ready for inspiration, for that is beyond my control and comprehension; but what I can be ready for is the chiseling and beautifying of this or that expression or phrase that comes to me when I least expect it. Let it be known here that I no longer seek to understand the mechanisms of myself, but rather desire my heart to guide me in my searches of self.
There seems to be a fatalistic component to apprehension that is unbeknownst to man, for man assigns to things within himself that come from without himself; that is to say, the nature of man is mysterious enough that no amount of conscious reflection is capable of ever revealing to him the algorithm behind his thought process—no amount of examples is sufficient to bring about a worthy generalization. The nature of man is anti-analytical; that is to say, irreducible and nonconformable to this or that reductionistic structure.
From Aristotle to Shen Kuo to Roger Bacon to Ramon Llull to Da Vinci to Robert Fludd to Francis Bacon to Kircher to Thomas Browne to Gottfried Leibniz to Ben Franklin to Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Young to Stephen Wolfram to ad infinitum—there has never been a universal man or profound genius capable of systematizing thought in such a way as to make it mechanical, like how a computer calculates sums. The spirit of man remains wholly unassailed in the natural course of human events: events which engender progress, virality, confidence, and utter dominance of our surroundings.
The modern man looks upon the African tribes of today and deems them uncivilized, not remembering that less than 10,000 years ago, we would have done the exact same thing they now censure as barbaric. I don’t think most people realize just how unnatural the modern world is. Modern leisure, interests, and occupations are only possible because we have organized vast swaths of humanity in such a way as to confer innumerable benefits upon them in the form of regulated supply chains, roads, manufacturing, sanitation, electrical grids, televisions, phones, cars, computers, planes, clean water, and the rest of the amenities we consider normal today. We, mankind, did that; we civilized because we saw it was possible to devise various plans of allocating resources and manpower to the construction of those things that were beneficial to us. But how do we return all this greatness? With utter indifference and the pomposity to claim, “This could be improved,” or, “Why isn’t this faster?”
The industrialized world is synonymous with modern, but I would claim that modern doesn’t always entail better. The common rabble amongst the scribblers, idlers, intellectuals, and literati of today is that the organizational framework by which all this leisure is conferred upon us comes with greater detriments than it is worth sustaining.
The individual who makes their living through thinking—the intellectual or writer or contemplator—always carries with them some deep-seated bias that they tremble to engage with for fear that they may discover the vanity of their own thought. It is a common thing to stay steadfast with a belief you know to be either wrong or uncertain; and yet, though there be no other consideration than how holding onto it makes you feel, you proceed into a debasing defense of it, and thus make yourself ridiculous. One, in such a case, should either admit the vanity of their conviction—and claim honestly that they hold to no objective grounds—or defend it on the grounds of evidence that they judged for themselves.
But to return to the common rabble, much talk abounds about the dead state of philosophy, the stagnation of literary theory, the general anti-intellectual sentiment, and the lack of funding for the humanities, sciences, and the arts—which, though I deeply regret and despise all such things, I find the happiest opportunity to allow for one to develop a new system that is a complete rejection of the current framework. When things are broken, you may either attempt to fix them or replace them. What determines which one you choose depends on how long the system (or creative endeavor) has been underway. It’s much easier to start from scratch if you’ve only been working on something for a day rather than a year; and so, if the system we have in place works, albeit sluggishly, then we can endure the inadequacy of it now and work towards making it more efficient in the future. However, if the system is compromised or rotten to the core, then no amount of enduring will save it. A banana doesn’t suddenly revert back to its yellow hue after a long enough time—it simply turns black and becomes too sweet to eat; and so, like a compromised system, it is more expedient to throw it out than salvage it.
When it comes to actually starting a revolt against an obviously injurious system, one must have, in the first place, the courage to withstand the blows of mockery, contempt, and dismissal. This is the first line of attack the naysayers have against the man of conviction and courage—they attack where they think easiest, and so they always go for the conceit bound up in the man's idea rather than anything substantive in the plans he provides.
The second thing to have is a plan. No great undertaking was ever successful on luck alone. It always required a vision that could be achieved in incremental steps—little by little, as more and more progress was made gradually, did the scale of the idea at once seem reasonable and doable. Luck, too, it should be admitted, has its role to play as well; for example, the conditions that lead up to a revolt in the first place are nothing but luck.
The third and last thing I will touch on is that the revolter must have an end goal; that is to say, must have some conclusion that coincides with the vision wholeheartedly. It is to be much regretted if a man performs his duties punctually and with the greatest delicacy but ultimately fails in the end for a foil in his conclusion which he hadn’t accounted for. It’s not enough to merely execute a plan faithfully: one's plan must ultimately work towards some conclusion or end goal; otherwise, you work without purpose, and that is sheer slavery. The conclusion should empower, vivify, and strengthen academia to the point that it becomes a counterbalancing force for everything that is wicked and corrupt in the world.
Those currently at the helm of power profit from an ignorant populace. That is why revolutionaries and intellectuals, those who fight for the common good of humanity, are first attacked when dictatorial regimes take power—because they know a dissenter who speaks for the common will of many could potentially lead to a revolt. And so, it’s easier to tell a single narrative that becomes inerrant than to argue for better policies amongst those who have actually suffered at the hands of idiotic decisions. The intellectual wields more power than any other single individual, even the lobbyist. They provide the foundations by which to uplift or demonize; and so, watch whose lips move most when speaking on this or that grievance—their underlying end goal, a most sinister thing, is often veiled in platitudes that are just tolerable enough and play just enough on the biases already implicit in the minds of the people so as to justify this or that illegal thing when no one is looking. That is ultimately how subversion works, and the intellectual is the architect of it all.