Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in loki232's LiveJournal:

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005
11:32 am	I am going to start trying to use this journal to prepare what I call my "facts of life" lectures and get them organized. Having a baby on the way has made it necessary for me to put pen to paper in earnest (I guess that metaphor doesn't really apply with computers, but whatever). What is a paradigm? A paradigm, by my definition, is simply a belief system which is used to explain things. For example, one paradigm is the religious paradigm. If one were to wonder, why is the sky blue? the easy answer is, because God made it that way. If asked by your child to explain the birds and the bees, one has a handy story of Adam and Eve to relate and draw correlations to (I know someone who did this). If asked how best to live life or what happens when we die, well, everyone knows the answer to these questions using the christian paradigm. I believe that the success of such paradigms as religious dogmas is that they take away the sting of death. I can imagine a time, long ago in the dawning of man's awareness, when Og stood over the body of his good hunting buddy Groob. Having just been slain by a sabretooth tiger, Groob lies torn open on the African savannah, partially eaten. Og thinks, man it is just such a bummer that I will never see Groob again, and will myself one day die, never again to enjoy a good mammoth steak. But then, as so many people do after going through a period of distress in which the mind verges on insanity, a switch in Og's brain is tripped and a light comes on: Groob is dead, but his spirit lives on! He is happy in caveman heaven, having sex ten times a day, eating mammoth and deer and whatever else he desires! The sabretooths are no longer to be feared but are tame pets! And when Og dies, he will join his friend and they will eat mammoth together forever! Thus, I imagine, was the first religious leader born. Og spread his story throughout the tribe, and so many people liked the idea that they made Og a shaman, a position in the tribe equal (or in some ways superior) to that of the chief, the guy who was in charge of organizing the group for food gathering, defense and mate distribution. Thus was created the first marriage of religion and politics. Now the chief had to change the way he ran things to accomodate the shaman, who had become very powerful in his own right. But his authority was not based on being the strongest caveman, but by telling a story that everyone liked and wanted to believe. Over time, Og found that to keep his followers interested, and to attract new ones, it was necessary to change and reinvent the story of the afterlife, and to add gods and demons and monsters to it. Soon, he had a whole mythology with stories which eventually became shaped into morality plays. This religion thing was turning out to be really handy! It could be used to explain virtually everything in life! No more unanswered questions for these people. How to cook your food, which way to travel when looking for new homes, whether or not to castrate your horses, circumcise your children, or beat your dog, what foods to eat, and not to eat, who to vote for in the next tribal election, who to fight in the next war, when to go to bed, when to get up, who to have sex with and who not to have sex with, who to fight and die for, all of these questions now had easy answers. People found it much easier to arrange their lives to accomodate someone else's belief system than to come up with one on their own. The religious paradigm spread throughout the world, evolving and changing to suit the needs and preferences of the people it encountered. After periods of isolation from one another, communities that had different needs found their religious beliefs developing along different lines. It wouldn't be long before some tribe that previously had the same religious beliefs as another distant related tribe found that their beliefs had changed. Now instead of worshipping the great animal spirits, this other tribe was worshipping one god called Yahweh! What blasphemers! They took the true religion and distorted it! Obviously corrupted by some demon or devil, these heretics must be destroyed! And thus the first religious wars came to be. A cursory understanding of the processes of evolution makes it easy to extrapolate from these humble beginnings to modern day religious pluralism. Religion is such a popular paradigm because it works. Having ready-made ideas is always easier than coming up with ideas on your own. This is what one might call the difference between wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom is when you take someone else's beliefs and apply them to your situation. Knowledge is when you think things through on your own and make the best decision based on your own, perhaps meager, intellect and experience. Wisdom is probably better than knowledge: It is almost always quicker to remember something like "don't cry wolf" than it is to think it through, or find it out from experience, and apply it. Wisdom survives because it works: the guy who thought that it would be better to jump into a lion's den than to have your wife give birth to a female child didn't live long enough to spread his ideas around, and everyone thought he was crazy anyway. Wisdom promoted survival and success, which caused it to spread rapidly from one person, tribe, culture and civilization to another. We are taught to remember and revere the names of people who imparted to us great wisdom: Jesus, Benjamin Franklin, Zoroaster, Buddha, and so on. Invoking these names gives weight to proclamations and makes you feel more comfortable about a course of action. One might also say it takes the responsibility for a decision off of your shoulders and puts it on these larger-than-life, fictionalized dead people. Now, if you choose a course of action based on the teachings of Jesus or Buddha or whoever, and it doesn't turn out so good for you, you can always say, I obeyed the command of God. No more personal responsibility! And it didn't take long for people who did something bad found other ways to avoid responsibility for it by claiming that the devil made them do it! Its hard to live life with confusion. And in modern times, with the advent of mass media, it has become even harder. With people being bombarded with information, religious paradigms find themselves more pressed than ever to explain the world. Why would god allow a tsunami that killed 100,000 children? How does a television work, if the bible never mentioned electrons and photons? What is the best way to live life, to be a greedy, workaholic, absentee father or a loving, stay-at-home bum who raises his children in poverty? Of course, in the past, when religion encountered something that it couldn't explain, it had the handy-dandy "the lord works in mysterious ways" excuse. But having to invoke it more and more often wears it sort of thin. Still in recent times people have found it comforting to retreat into the refuge of religious dogma rather than face thorny issues to which there seem no right answer. I suppose there's nothing wrong with this, as long as you realize that's what you're doing. There are, of course, other paradigms of a non-religious nature. Modern science is one. Freud's theory of psychosexual development is another. The idea of Darwinian evolution through natural selection is a third. The world abounds in paradigms, some more coherent and some less, and some more self-evident and some less. Problems arise when you think that the paradigm in which you believe is the best and everyone ought to agree with you, or that all other paradigms but your own are the work of weaker or deviant minds. Its a curious fact that people find it hard to create belief systems for themselves. If I were to say, invent a pantheon of deities and demigods, I couldn't believe in it, since I knew I had created it as a fiction. Even if I imbibed some intoxicating substance to induce visions of potentially religious significance, I would find it hard to believe myself in that deluded state. But other people might not find it so hard. Indeed, religions almost always have leaders, who introduce the rest of humanity to their beliefs before disappearing from the world, someday to return. Thus, the idea of faith was born. Its like a recursive mind virus: You have to see to believe, but you have to believe to see. Going to take a break and reorganize my thoughts.
Friday, June 24th, 2005
7:45 pm	I don't have anything particularly exciting to report today. No trenchant epiphanies to reveal in my journal. Although I suppose I out to add some more on previous posts in which I talked about Malthus and Macchiavelli. In addition to their philosophies, I am also drawn to the concept of memetics as a means of cultural development. More on this later.
Monday, June 6th, 2005
8:55 pm	It occurred to me recently that people involved in some form of the "search for truth" often spend much of their lives involved in study of some esoteric knowledge, hoping to find some secret wisdom that will make life's many complexities make sense, will summarize all the incongruities into a single axiom or mantra, or will reveal the hidden answers to all their questions; but at some point, they realize, or simply accept in despair, the truth that there is no truth, no one unifying theme behind all existence, no enlightenment to be discovered. What seems funny is that, having spent so much time inundating themselves in the deceptions of their particular path at the expense of developing any real marketable job skills, they decide to make money by using all of their knowledge to deceive other people who are involved in the "search for truth." The so-called "search for truth" becomes a massive ponzi scheme with an endless supply of devotees.
Tuesday, May 31st, 2005
9:49 pm	return after long absence The occasion for my return to this journal is my recent desire to catalog my philosophical progress. I have been doing a fair amount of reading in philosophy and history lately, and it seems that the closest I have come to finding a coherent and descriptive political ideology is from the works of Malthus and Macchiavelli. The world seems to make sense when seen in Malthusian/Macchiavellian terms.
Sunday, January 4th, 2004
8:19 pm	More recurring dream themes: insects crawling all over my apartment, makes me wake up feeling creepy and unclean; being assaulted by someone, I have a gun, but when I try to shoot the assailant, it has no effect--I usually suffer some violence from which I awake feeling angry and violent...I have often wondered if this dream indicates some kind of impotence fear or something. The naked dream, which I really don't have very often, in which I find myself in a public place with no clothes on. That's all I can remember right now. I think that some of the things I was taught as a child sort of programmed me for failure. Like being told I can do anything I set my mind to. I wanted to be so many things growing up. I wanted to be physically strong like Arnold, I wanted to be a martial arts expert like Jean Claude, I wanted to be a military weapons expert like Stallone, I wanted to be a hacker, an expert with multiple languages, an engineer, a physicist, an economist, a doctor, a lawyer, a writer, other things. I had many aptitudes, and pursued them all to varying degrees of excellence, but I never got very good at anything, and as a result I am not very competitive in a job market that increasingly demands specialization. I now know I should pursue one of my aptitudes to some point where I can make a career of it. But I am having some difficulty making up my mind what I want to do with the rest of my life, and anyway it doesn't seem like I am going to be given the chance to do anything different. I have no money, bad credit, and very few job skills. Seems I am condemned to at least a few more years of ignominy as, at best, a mid-level retail employee or, at worst, a shiftless layabout, unemployed and unemployable. Long live capitalism.
6:03 am	Another recurring theme in my dreams is having sex with a woman. Sometimes I have no idea who the woman is, and other times it is someone I know. When it is not someone I know, I wake up somewhat sexually aroused. (what a surprise.) But when it is someone I know, I usually feel a sexual attraction for that person that lingers for a couple of weeks. I have also had variations on a dream of playing basketball and being able to dunk. I usually become aware of it because I am playing basketball in my dream, I go up for a lay-up, and I keep rising, getting so close to the rim that I realize that nothing is stopping me from dunking it. Its kind of funny, because I usually rationalize inside these dreams that this is reality and I had dreamed that I couldn't dunk. I never dream of flying, only of running and dunking. Anyway, I usually wake from these dreams to discover I cannot in fact dunk, and I feel a pang of regret. I have even tried going back to sleep immediately and attempting to forget the reality. It's a very exhilirating sensation, running to the basket and taking off. I know that I would injure myself badly trying to get my body to the point where I could do it in real life. You just can't propel a 5 foot 9 inch 200-pound body through the air using a lever as structurally inefficient as the human knee.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2004
6:17 pm	I usually remember my dreams. I have never had a recurring dream, but I have recurring themes in my dreams. One common theme of my dreams is being on the run from the police. I've done something wrong, and I know they are coming for me. I try to think of what to do, but I am paralyzed by doubt and fear. I try to run, but am terribly afraid that wherever I run to, they will be waiting for me. I dread turning any corner for fear that I will be caught. Usually I wake up from these dreams with a feeling of mild to intense anxiety, and wonder if the dream indicates some hidden problem in my waking life that I am ignoring that is eventually going to catch up with me. One time I had this dream and it went on longer than usual. I was running through some woods with snowy patches on the ground. Somewhere behind me, unseen and unheard, I knew the authorities were closing in. I came to a paved road running through the woods. As I emerged onto the road, a car came around the bend. I recognized the woman inside as my lover, even though I have never seen her in waking life. She opens the car door and tells me to get in. I do so and we drive away. I woke up with a feeling of intense relief. I had this dream when I was 13, and ever since then I have always imagined that the woman I was meant to be with was the one that would defy the world to save me. Maybe this is an unrealistic expectation, or I am misinterpreting the dream, or looking for meaning where there is none. I don't know.