Man-Bear-Pig

Well here I am mindlessly diving into a trend like one of you plebs. Honestly I got to thinking about the bear vs man meme and posted my thoughts in a comment section about it, and decided to just take that and post it here as well, haha. So here we go, this is the perspective of a man who is not offended by this meme. 

Does the situation make me sad? Yes it is does. Does it make me feel like my demographic is now more noticeably held in a lower regard? You could say that. But so does recognising that my "race" confers advantages, (or if you prefer, lacks disadvantages) different to those experienced by other races.

Both of these are similar educational experiences. Not in the sense that they make me realise something about me is tainted or in some way shameful, but because its opens my eyes to the perspective of people I may not normally relate to. It's an "Oh! That's what it's like for them?" moment.

Experiences like these do make me sad, but only because I am being made aware of a sad thing. And yes the cause of that negativity can be assigned to demographics of which I am, loosely, a member. But I don't take that as an attack. How could I? I am not my demographic. They are not monoliths. This is what every civil rights campaign throughout history has been all about, teaching us that things can be individually or even systemically true but are not reflective of people as a whole.

It's an honest experience being conveyed to me, not a personal judgement. I haven't yet felt like anyone is saying "YOU are worse than a bear". I hear people saying "I fear the bear, I fear men. I fear bears less than men. I don't know you, so on balance, I would rather meet the bear". Sure, maybe some people are using this to shame and attack all men just because it's an excuse to be cruel and tribal. People do love their little clubs. But this phenomenon clearly extends far beyond any such outliers, the majority of people talking about this aren't doing it to hurt me. 

It's not about me, it's about them. It's not an attack, it's an honest expression of sincere emotion. It hurts me, yes. Both out of empathy and on some selfish level of not wanting to be seen as a dangerous predator. But no one is coming *at* me with that. They are just saying men have hurt them. No, not men like me. But they don't know that. Just like the black man knows only of my privilege, not whether I feel entitled to it. To judge the privilege is not to judge the demographic.

When I hear about the bear meme it makes me aware of the fact that so many other men have fallen so far short of the mark of basic decency that women can't safely assume any of us are less dangerous than a bear. I don't like this, but it isn't an opinion I am disliking, it's the facts that inform it. I don't like the FACT that it's true so many women feel that way.

But it is true, isn't it? That's all that's being offered here. A truthful, honest opinion. How can I be offended by an honest sentiment? They are not targeting me. My fellow men drew the target. The people agreeing on the bear are just... Acknowledging it. The only reason it would affect me emotionally is if I took it personally. What's the point in taking a sincere expression of personal feeling personally? It's *not* an attack. It's not about me.

Now I commend your compassion, and I think you have a valid point. Even though I don't think they SHOULD take it personally, clearly a lot of of men are doing so. Their pain is real. It should not be trivialized. But they can be educated about how to process that pain constructively. If your gender is so important to you that someone being intimidated by it wounds you, you're missing the point. We shouldn't be so concerned with how this tangentially makes us look. We have to put that ego aside and realise that the important thing is that WOMEN ARE AFRAID OF US.

All they are doing is making me aware of it. I don't want it to be true, and it's not my fault that it is true. But it's definitely not their fault either. So by getting mad at them for pointing it out, all I would be doing is rallying with the men who caused that fear. By saying an attack on them is an attack on me, I adopt them. I don't want to adopt them. I don't want to stand with people like that. Why would I be offended, then, by someone saying "THOSE people made me afraid of men." I'm not those people. I am their victim, as are the women made distrusting of men (though not to the same extent of course).

We need to distinguish between being made sad about a fact of reality and being made sad because someone DID that to you by being sad at you. It's an incredibly childish attitude, when you think about it, to conflate these two things. Think about this in any other context. Person 1 puts a label on their lunch in the company fridge because person 2 keeps taking it. Why should I have to read a warning that tells me not to steal the lunch? I'm not a lunch thief! Because the world doesn't revolve around me. You could also say the same about laws. Why should I have to wear a seat belt? I'm a good driver! Answer - because I'm not the only driver on the road.

When one person causes harm it changes the dynamics of the world for us all, to some degree, because for better or worse we are all connected. Some people fight that connection to their dying breath, finding abhorrance in any form of tolerance, compassion, and kindness. The sorts of people who take shelter in misogyny or dumb macho crap, in wild homo/transphobia, ridiculous conspiracy theories and a paradoxical hatred and fetish for authority. We all know the type. And it doesn't surprise me how strong an overlap there seems to be between that group and the people complaining about the bear meme.

But that connection can also be embraced and doing so can make us stronger, both as individuals and collectively. I'm not offended by the bear. Because women are trying to tell me something. Even if I disagree, which I don't necessarily, it's something they honestly feel. That's something I can learn from. I want to know how I'm being seen, even if I wish I were being seen in a better light. I want to know that people do things to earn that perspective so I can call it out when I see it more effectively. So I can set a better example. So I can show the women in my life that I'm better than a bear. Why would I want to do that? Because they are *telling* me they want to know it. What's wrong with listening and learning?

Are we really so prideful, as a species, that the mere idea of there being something new we need to learn is offensive to the point of triggering a neurosis? Are we so *arrogant* that we will ignore a huge collective of people telling us something is wrong just because we got splashed by a brush that was only as broad as it needed to be? It's become such a theme of modern society, to yell how dare you at the truth. We need to be better. We need to learn how to to learn again. Not take the recognition of our own ignorance as an attack. 

It's not an attack on me, to know other men have caused this fear, because I don't associate myself with them. What the men who react emotionally to this meme really need to do is ask themselves why they *do*. And maybe, in that, there is another lesson to be learned. If it's so offensive to be regarded more vicious than a wild animal, maybe getting irrationally angry and aggressive at the ones expressing that fear is, literally, the problem.

The Artifice of our Intelligence

I've come to a revelation about the "AI question". It may take some meandering for me to grapple with my thoughts here, so bear with me.

At the root of the primal, almost atavistic fear that I think people have about this technology, is something existential in nature. The gnawing itch of a concern that perhaps cannot easily be put into words, because it speaks to something so elemental to the human condition. The same uncanny valley sense of repulsion we feel when a CGI face is close enough to reality to feel... just a little bit off in the worst way, or a human-like robot gesticulating in ways that seem so very like us, and yet, just a tiny bit not.  

It is a fear of being replaced, I think. And not just in the professional, monetary sense, although that is a valid concern, but on a more emotional level, we seem to nurse a fear of being upstaged by something we made. Albeit in a complex, indirect way, and entangled in neuroses. Disguised behind layers of pathological self-loathing and evolutionary disdain for anything enough like us to steal a mate or take the last berry, and the fear of anything unlike us enough to be a predator or false prey hiding venom and spines behind tantalizing flesh. Let me elucidate.

When we see these machinations of persona, the near perfect imitation of intelligence from an automaton, it triggers something in our monkey brains. Perhaps, the same realisation triggered by the scuttling of a cockroach or the feeling of something absent of bodyheat laying a sentient touch at the small of the back. A horror, a raw, outraged horror at the audacity of something mindless and yet alive daring to exist. Perhaps, it horrifies us because we see something of ourselves in it. Maybe it makes us aware of our own mindlessness. How we, too, are automatons feigning sentience, all trying to do a perfect impression of what we think a person should be. Maybe that's why nothing terrifies us quite so much as a human-shaped silhouette in the dark. Unknowable monsters we can deal with... but people... people are the monsters we know.
I think that's what the monkey brain reacts to. That unfathomable idea. What if we create something as mindless as we are? And in so doing, recognize our own limitations. What if, after binding together all these thoughts and materials in a stroke of creative genius, we find ourselves backing away in Frankensteinean terror when we see it lift itself from the table and amble out into a world we thought to be our domain alone. A new thing, living, existing, and made in the image of the monster we know.

The idea of machines that think for themselves is not intrinsically offensive to me, and I suspect to many others, at least those not primed to react a certain way by science fiction tropes they have been bombarded with their whole lives. It's that Cain and Abel thing, I think. That fear of being replaced. Usurped. It's the idea of something not doing my work for me, but my THINKING, my FEELING for me, that triggers this apish rush of panic in me.

Show me an AI that can run the government and control the nuclear button, and I will be concerned, sure, but show me an AI that can compose poetry and paintings, and I take it personal. Because those aren't tasks. Those aren't the ropes and gears of social machinery in need of manning, those are the endeavours we choose. The ones that choose US. The moments of undefinable clarity where a perfect arrangement of factors within the universe demands we express something normally locked within our meat prisons. Art is how we escape ourselves, how one soul trapped in the dark touches another, and realises that a whole other world exists therein. I don't want a machine to... FEEL that for me. That's mine. You can't have it. That's what the monkey brain says to that idea. That's the panic I feel at the concept. If I am the mindless cockroach, stranded on this endless journey to find something real in myself to become, something to express... I don't want something I made, something I know to be artificial to feel that too. The goal of all art is connection... cutting a pinprick in the black firmament that enshrouds my pretend world through which I may see a glimmer of someone else's, a testament shared between two souls trying to become, a testament that some part of us... IS. If I succeed in this, I want that accomplishment to mean something. And if the image I painted on a canvas can do it too, it means nothing. If I reach through that schism and find that other internal world to be something made by something I made... I have escaped nothing. No new world discovered, just a new hallway I built unintentionally in my own.

But maybe... there's another way to look at this. People are worried because AI learns from us, and then creates art from what it learned. The fear is that this makes us... superfluous. Obsolete. Humans are no longer needed for art because machines can do it too. In a nutshell, that's the basic argument that underpins all these existential fears. And again, I understand the monetary concerns and find them all valid, that's not really what I'm addressing. I'm whispering back to the whisper in the back of your mind that even as I speak is saying... "Kill it. Kill it now." Because there is something so antagonising about making something that can outthink us.

But what it MEANS to be a human being is something that is in a constant state of change. Disregard AI for a moment, and imagine instead we had just one, incredibly clever human being. And they could study and learn from and replicate the art styles of every other artist who ever lived. Would we feel the same horror? At best, I think, would be a profound jealousy, maybe an inferiority complex. But this hypothetical person can only replicate what the rest of us have ALREADY created. Sure, maybe they can extrapolate from that and create original pieces, but then so can we. But we don't need AI to do that - AI needs that from us. If the nature of humanity is forever changing, then even with the uncredited slurry of 3 thousand years of human endeavour fed into the machine, it can never create something that shows us who we are... 100 years from now. Even if it gets real good at predicting... fundamentally, it's our choices, our memes that will bring us there. So in a sense, this technology is only growing as much as we are. If all creative endeavour stopped right here, right now, then sure AI will still be used to replace it, but ultimately its growth will be stunted because the source material stopped being made, and it had nothing left to feed it.

And in the end, it's just doing what we all do. When we create stories or poems or webcomics or videogames, we are always drawing on influences that came before, even just in terms of that medium being a pre-existing format. Fundamentally, there may be so such thing as original art. And if AI becomes so good that it learned from us well enough to create truly unique new works of expression - such that it actually CONTRIBUTES to the same culture on which it relies... then is it not at that point just another person? Another kind of artist? If it isn't just mindlessly replicating patterns associated with moods, in which case it still needs us to create new content to draw on, but it is itself FEELING those moods and expressing them... why not just regard it as that one very clever man?

None of this addresses the issue of artists being starved out by yet another cut and paste program that attempts and bottle and sell creativity at prices which undermine those incurred at the cost of real human spirit. This is still and will continue to be a very real issue, and an avenue of business ethics we are all going to have to explore well in years to come. There's no putting that genie back in that bottle, and I do think people who are troubled by the implications AI technology will have on their ability to monetize their talents is legitimate, and I wish I had a solution to that, but I don't. But as for my own primal fear, my sense of being incredibly disturbed by something that does my thinking and feeling for me, and expresses things I wish I could have expressed as well, I think this different way of looking at it sets me at ease a little. AI cannot replace us in that respect, because who we are is constantly changing, and it can only ever try to keep up with us by following the changes WE make to our own culture. And if it could ever lead the way in making those changes, maybe it earned it. And maybe someone else, even an AI, being really, REALLY good at poetry doesn't undermine my poems, if it comes from a sincere place.

While I am still disturbed by the idea of synthetic intelligences in the sense of it being a living consciousness that could be copied and rewritten and so on, that's a whole other mess to worry about later. But I am less worried about it replacing me as a creative being, because that relationship depends on me and those like me first creating the stuff it needs to work off of to attempt to then make something new. If it knew what I was going to create already, it wouldn't need me, and it does, because ultimately I am the engine. Not it.

Rediscovery at 37

Well then. Tomorrow both I and my hair turn 38, and quite by serendipity I have around this same time come to the end of a very long, arduous and boring journey. A story I feel compelled to inflict upon you now.

Normally I don't go into specifics about my own life, and I prefer to keep this blog for more profound and informative posts, an attempt at sharing what wisdom I have gestated over the many horrific decades of my life... which is why there is so little content here lolololol.

But just this once, here is your origin story for The Founder, as I used to be known on the webernets, and how he came to be this fine disfigure of a man you see before you today. Specifically, this is the story of how my disabilities and their mental illness side salad brought me from barely functioning, to kinda functioning, to essentially living in squalor, and eventually to having enough of my ducks in a row that I can finally afford to think about actually living.


THE SPAWNING

Born in the UK slums to a financially struggling and largely oval-shaped family, it became clear from a young age that I wasn't quite like the other kids. You may have heard stories about great minds of eras past who did extraordinary things like inventing a new kind of calculus or privatising cancer as infants, and then there's me, the savant who precisely ordered his lego blocks by size and colour, cross-referenced with function, up his nose.

Largely mute but hardly quiet, I invented a sophisticated language of mind-numbing screams and thrown toys to direct my parents in their tortured attempts at raising me, unfortunately they never quite deciphered it, and eventually they were forced to have me assessed in what passed for the medical system of the time. The conclusion was that I was Dyspraxic (a complex biological category that roughly translates as "boy's fucked up") and likely autistic. 

In those days not much was known about things like autism, and treatments ranged from medical grade methamphetamine to hanging them upside-down in a bag and beating them with sticks with the word "love" written on the side. My parents settled for the innovative approach of constantly yelling at me and making it clear I was the reason their lives sucked until I learned to stay in my room and not bother them with my spiralling mental health, while they yelled each other into an infidelity-fuelled divorce and spontaneous lesbianism.

I became more and more withdrawn from the penal colony the world calls "school" until eventually I had to be assigned various aid programs to help me function because I was essentially doing nothing, a prescient glimpse of my future I lacked the irony-comprehension to understand at the time. Nevertheless, I struggled through and collapsed at the finish line at age 16, going on to unsuccessfully pursue a college degree in art, and then, by the grace of Zeus, to succeed in getting that extremely useful qualification. It's hanging on the wall right now next to the gold star I got for being special in primary school. Honestly I think the latter has been more useful, career-wise.

It had been clear to me and most everyone who knew me at this point that I wasn't headed to a shining future as a stock broker. Truth be told, despite seeming fairly functional mentally, I doubt I would have been able to handle cleaning toilets. I just lack something, something central to the human condition that almost everyone else seems to have.

Behind every single action a person takes ultimately must exist a spark that incepts that action, and for whatever reason, in almost all circumstances, that spark is missing from me. Not motivation, not desire, not even the sense of urgency that triggers your adrenaline and forces immediate action. Something more elemental than all of that just doesn't exist in my brain. You can learn more on that in the "My Fault" blog I posted a handful of posts and a couple decades back, but suffice to say, the way I lived, and sadly still do live my life is... not healthy.

Fortunately, my mother had succeeded in getting me on the disability benefits that existed when I was young. A process I hadn't enjoyed, as I remember distinctly having to sit there while she told them how dysfunctional I was, lacking the higher reasoning to understand that it was for my own good. A process I nearly derailed, when she told them I had been hurting myself, and I angrily chirped up telling her that wasn't true. ...it was true. 

And so, now a young adult, as I proudly limped out into the world and dug out a nice hovel to live in, I had some degree of financial security. Of course, to any normal person, it would have seemed worse than a slave wage, but it was all I knew. I didn't think I was well off by any means, however, compared to what was to come... I was. That was a lot of wasses in that sentence. It seems weird. Was. Was. Is was really a word? It's lost all meaning. ANYWAY.


THE ASSESSMENT 

Eventually I got a letter in the mail telling me I was due to take a mandatory medical assessment to determine my continued unfitness for work. A delightful little task, wherein someone being drip-fed just barely enough money to survive is expected to make a journey their neurological conditions make very difficult to attempt to convince someone else that their permanent disabilities are still there and they are consequently still sufficiently useless to qualify for society's pity.

I've probably talked about this in prior posts, so I will be brief now. Here's how it went. I arrived on time and was kept waiting for what felt like 2 hours. Eventually I was directed into a room with a bored looking doctor who very ironically had no interest in maintaining eye contact with the autistic kid. I felt more like part of the furniture. He asked me basic questions, name, birthday etc, then handed me a computer keyboard and asked if I could hold it. Suffice to say, I was confused, but scared, so I did as I was told. He sent me on my way inside of 2 minutes.

Some weeks later I received a letter saying, and these words have never quite left the inside of my skull upon which they were scored as I read it, "after our 45 minute thorough assessment we have determined you are fit to work". 

You know that feeling you get sometimes when you're nodding off to sleep and suddenly you feel like you're falling? Like the floor just gave way and for an instant you are made of pure panic? In that moment, the planet gave way. It was event #1 in what would become my new existence. The following years are a bit of a blur, I was still falling, and crashed through various appeals that went nowhere (more in the My Fault post again) and a few jobcenter appointments, which eventually landed me in a serious mess.


THE MESS

I do not lie. This is one thing most who come to know me quickly learn, and sometimes even learn to appreciate, although the adjustment can be prickly. In this situation I was forced to lie. Not only lie, commit to, in writing, and live according to a lie, in order to survive. So many commas. With my disability safety nets removed I had to "sign on", AKA the dole; unemployment benefits. To do so, I had to sign a pledge that says I am fit to work. The system under which I had no choice but to live, had compelled me to tell a lie to survive. And in doing so, to accept all future responsibility for any fallout I may suffer.

Remember when I said my disability benefits were essentially a slave wage? Well, cut that in half. Now add in more stress than this adolescent who is barely more functional than a plushie has ever experienced in their life. Maybe to an NT (neurotypical) person it wouldn't seem so bad. Obligations to apply for x number of jobs per week, to attend interviews whenever they were arranged, to attend a constant, dizzying array of "work courses" designed to condescend to us like the reason we're not in work is because we haven't been trained in how to compose a CV (resume) for the 20th time.

That building became a Democlesean sword hanging over my head... a perpetual threat to make me homeless and starving. Every week, as my JSA appointment was looming, I knew that this could be the day I get a bad adviser, a snotty old school thinker, a temp who doesn't know what they're doing. This could be the week I say the wrong thing, trigger some red flag subroutine programmed into their corporate brains that makes them unravel my entire life. It's life having a gun to your head every day all day.

And it happened. Several times. You ask an innocent question and you see their face turn... like they become a stranger to themselves, You see RuinLife.exe booting up behind their eyes. Oh you expressed interest in this? Well now it is your new purpose, you will do this or your benefits are gone. The new advisers were the worst... rose-eyed and keen to impress their superiors, they don't know you, they take one look at you and decide they have figured out what you need, and suddenly you have a pile of unmeetable obligations thrust upon you. You're just a stepping stone to their career advancement.

I was "sanctioned" numerous times, which is where they take away your slave wage, usually as punishment for them making a mistake, the wrong appointment time sent out, them having the wrong file up when they see you and thinking you're not following your commitments. Then you have to request an appeal which gets automatically denied, and then appeal that, and eventually, if you're lucky, as I was a couple times, you find yourself in a courthouse with a nice judge who looks at the paperwork and notes how ridiculous it is that things got this far. 

Many were not so lucky. I've heard tales of chronically physically disabled people (still considered fit to work of course, because the system is broken) who mentioned off hand they volunteer in a local charity shop once a week to help their community, and suddenly their unemployment benefits are stopped, their work criteria are updated so they must now apply for retail positions since they proved they can do it, they are forced to bring daily notes to the jobcenter declaring every single instance of the £0.00 they make per hour of their volunteer job before their benefits will be resumed. Like, seriously, one misplaced word, and these people have the power and will to absolutely ruin your life.

I even remember one day as I was doing my mandatory job searching on their inhouse computers (so they can more vulturishly oversee your every action) there was this old man sat staring blankly at his monitor. He had never used a computer before in his life. He didn't have a clue how to operate it. It might as well have been a nuclear power station for all he understood it. I had to coach him quickly in how to operate it, because I knew they didn't care, and would punish him for not doing his job search. It was like being in a prison. Those days were genuinely terrifying.

But not to worry, it's about to get worse!


THE ROOMMATE

So, one of my oldest and dearest friends was, around this time, trying to turn his own life around. He too had been living in squalor, having escaped the gang (well, perhaps mafia would be more apropos) culture in his home country of Lithuania following some traumatising events, and now, while essentially homeless and starving, he was being faced with military draft. For those rare few of you who aren't Lithuanian (you minorities make me sick) you probably don't understand the implications of this, but those who live there do. Their military is notorious for being a hellhole, like being a GITMO prisoner but as a career. He had to get out of there.

And so he came to the most well-off, privileged person he knows. Well, at least he came to someone he knew he could trust. He begged me to let him move in with me in the UK. I would essentially be saving his life, and he would be eternally grateful. What choice did I really have?

So, he came to this country and eventually found his way to my hovel. He had next to nothing with him, just an old keypad cellphone upon which he was so used to typing it was genuinely unnerving to watch his hand vibrate like The Flash as he texted, and a rucksack. He moved in, and around that exact same time, the Government decided that it was time to crack down on all those naughty people gaming the system for freebies, you know, the ones everyone are convinced exists but no one ever sees. And according to them, the best way to do this was to punish everyone. Overnight the obligations placed me tripled, the threat of making a single mistake grew exponentially, and... well...

Remember when I said my jobseekers benefit was like half of a slave wage? Well, cut that in half. Now add another mouth to feed.

I thought I had known living in squalor. Then suddenly I was spending hours outdoors looking for dropped pennies on the floor so that I could afford to buy rice from the reduced section at the local supermarket. We were both doing the best we could to survive. I actually learned a lot from him, being very antisocial and hermit-like myself, I never went out much, but now I had to, as he taught me where to look to go foraging for wild blackberries and apples, we made a few laps a week near a neighbour's cherry tree to look for dropped fruit. He taught me various Slavic budget food dishes... the things those people can do with potatoes. 

Don't get me wrong, this wasn't an improvement over before he got here, it was survival. We were both in a state of crisis. To make matters worse, he had brought a bunch of debts with him, and Lithuania is not one of those countries that goes "oh he moved, never mind I guess I'll forget this", it's one of those countries that's like "I will fucking extradite you just to make you tell me face to face you can't afford to pay me". Because of the spiralling situation, I was finding myself in debt too.

I had always been very careful to never let that happen, but when you basically have no money, no amount of budgeting can help you pay your bills. The bank I was with at the time also decided to pile on, doing one of those legally ambiguous "you have no money so we charged you a fee... oh someone just charged you a fee and you have no money, we will charge you a fee for that. Oh look, someone charged you a fee, let's charge you a fee for that" moves, sending me hurtling into thousands of pounds worth of debt in the space of a few weeks.

So now I'm on a nothing income, with extra bills, an extra mouth to feed who can't apply for jobseekers himself because he's an alien (not the space kind... well, yes actually but that's irrelevant) and suddenly the kinda debts that usually only investment bankers have to deal with. FUN TIMES. And I would like to remind you that all of this happened to me because I had a brain that simply could not handle doing traditional work. I mean, I lived in a pigsty and lived off of instant noodles and wild foliage. I literally couldn't function as an adult. This lifestyle that can only be described as punitive, was because I was born defective. That's what I did to deserve all of this.

This is where things improve a little. Eventually Mr. Roommate decides he like money, and finds himself a job. This brings an actual income stream into our uncivil partnership. I wouldn't go so far as to say we were doing well at this point, it was a mcdonald's job, and boy I could write a whole other post about the horrors of that corporation just from how I saw them treat him. Changing his shift times daily from middle of the night to early morning, constantly expecting more and more productivity from them, it was like chinese torture. But we were surviving.


OH NO IT GETS BAD AGAIN

This is getting a little off topic, so let's steer back on course. My roommate lived with me for about ten years, which seems super weird in hindsight, it feels like a flash in the pan but it was actually a whole ass era of my life. In that time we had all kinds of ups and downs, him getting fired, me getting sanctioned, trying to claw back, him getting a better job, society realising they were basically abusing people on benefits and deciding to add a bit more money back to jobseekers.

Eventually we were both living in a comfortable, albeit in no way even working class lifestyle. I had come to depend on him and that extra money, we had improved our internet service, adjusted to being able to acquire food that didn't grow from weeds, and so on. But as is the way of things, at least for normal people, his life pulled him forwards. He met a girl online, saved up, and left to go be with her. There was no malice in this, but keep in mind, his presence had effectively propped my life up on stilts, and two of them were about to walk out from under it.

I remember the last day he was here, just before he was due to leave, I asked him to help me dispose of my old bedframe. A distressed, rusty old self-assembly cheapo one I had kept long past its shelf life, held together with string and strategically placed furniture because I couldn't afford a replacement. The metaphor for my life had very deliberately given up the ghost and become unusable at the most ironic time possible, and after my friend was gone I wouldn't have been able to carry it to the tip by myself. So I asked for a hand. And after it was gone, so, in short order, was he.

My front door closed to a kind of silence I hadn't known in a decade. Within a few lonely, quiet minutes of him leaving, I could only retreat to my cave and think about the future. Knowing I had lost my safety net, and now lived with debts I had never before imagined, bills and expenses twice what I had been able to handle alone. Even my dog, who had essentially been like a daughter in my heart and my only real reason to go on living, had recently died. Maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, I don't really know, but as I sat there in the putrid junkyard that was my bedroom, kneeling in a bedless cavity in the trash, I cried. Not because my future was uncertain; but because it was certain. Because I had peaked. 

Remember when I said those parts of my life were traumatic and terrifying, and essentially chipped away at my mental health? Well, cut that mental health in half. The last 9 years of destitution had been the high point of a life that now had nowhere to go but roll sadly back down the hill it had finally climbed. The next couple of years would lead to one of two things. Either I would find a way to turn things around, or I would end up on the streets, and shortly thereafter... well, no longer on the streets.

I needed help, the kind I had been putting off seeking for a long time, because I didn't want to admit to the world what a sad, needy loser I was.


THE SAD, NEEDY LOSER

It was time to try to get back on disability benefits, a prospect I had tentatively faced a couple times over the years, but suffice to say, when you have mental disabilities that make doing ANYTHING incredibly hard, it doesn't take much arm twisting to get you to give up on an endeavour. And even sufficer to say, when someone whose job is to give legal advice to vulnerable people laughs in your face when you ask about getting started on seeking disability, that arm is more than sufficiently twisted. 

But this time I had no choice. My back was to the wall, and in situations like that, at a certain cost in sanity, I can sometimes force myself to take action. So this time I powered through all the marble faces telling me I had no chance, and sat myself down with someone could tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. First order of business - I needed a "fit note", an ironically named document issued by my doctor declaring that in her medical opinion, based on my medical records, I was not fit for work. 

Truth be told the timeline here is a little jumbled, because some of this happened during my earlier attempts at getting on disability, and a lot of it was a long term process with a lot of moving parts and a lot of me giving up for years at a time while my life gradually spiralled more and more out of control. But for the simplicity of storytelling, the chain of events went roughly thus:

Me asking for fit note; her saying she doesn't understand what that is. Arm twisted. Give up on attempt.

Me asking for fit note and explaining clearly what it is and that whether she fucking understands it or not there is a system in place for this so just fucking do it already. Her saying she needs to "get to know me" better, that she didn't feel she can judge my condition... despite having been my doctor for like 20 years. Arm twisted; give up.

Me finally telling her look fine I will make multiple pointless appointments per week where I will sit down and still be autistic thereby wasting your time and doing stuff my brain makes very hard for me to do, and you can "get to know" my disability, whatever the fuck that means. Her then telling me she needs to see proof of my disabilities to be able to judge the situation, and scrolling through my medical records on her computer to learn more about my childhood diagnosis. 

My diagnosis was gone. No longer in my medical records. No proof anyone ever said to anyone else that I had so much as a mild learning difficulty. My case for disability was now weaker than when I had dishonestly declared MYSELF fit to work. Arm broken.

I mean... what do you even DO when the records fail you? When the system you are having to depend on even just to navigate the system itself has just forgotten you? Where do you go? The actual facts of the situation had apparently changed, and you're already fighting for your life just trying to ask a damn GP for help. Was it malicious? Is this a way the "man" used to try to keep people from getting financial help? Had some lazy fucker just turned two pages over at the same time by accident when digitizing my paper records?

Did it even matter? The message was well-received, and the message was the world telling me "I don't want you".

So, not only was I still in the same position, I also had to start from scratch. I needed to be diagnosed... again. At this point it's like I'm hanging onto the edge of a cliff my by fingernails and the fucker I'm begging for help is kicking my hands. I'm already this close to just giving up and taking the easy way out, and life is making it very clear that I wouldn't be missed. 

Fortunately for me, where life failed to put in me that precious spark that motivates action, it did happen to leave a nice dollop of seething rage. Something one accumulates in a life filled with endless frustration and disillusionment. I can't go on living out of my own self-interest, but if I hate you enough, I will survive out of sheer spite. And as it turned out, that spite gave me just enough impetus to make one final run at my fate. And I stress most stressedly, this was definitely the last sprint I had in me.

Now, as it turns out, you can't just BE assessed for autism. No no, life would be much too simple. No what you have to do is say the right series of specific phrases at your doctor like you're feeding commands into an outmoded DOS system. My first few attempts failed, my doctor (a new and improved one fortunately) kept angling for me to say the right things that would allow him to give me help, and grimacing when I didn't say exactly what he needed to hear.

The dance was very subtextual, but not subtle, he made it clear to me what was happening. You're not supposed to self-diagnose, they tell you, but then they also expect you to be able to distil with clinical precision the exact nature and depth of a plethora of mental symptoms from a soup of otherwise benign personality traits. I have to know and describe what's wrong with me to professional standards while also not looking like I am trying to fake it. It's essentially a performance, doing an exact impression of the truth with no human deviation from the textbook. My audience was my gatekeeper to the land of diagnosis, and I had not answered his riddles three.

This led me to seeking therapy, something I at least had the means to request through my doctor, well justified by my rampant depression and anxiety, which made for comfortable bedfellows to my neurological defects. She did help me a lot in terms of finding coping mechanisms and such, but the greatest favour she did me was to recommend an autism and ADHD assessment come the end of our sessions, as she, like my doctor, had the authority to do that, and unlike my doctor, wasn't beholden to a system being pressured from on high to make life miserable for anyone seeking help.

Seeing that pearl on the horizon as we worked through every session made it much easier to bear the weight of mounting debts and poor nutrition. In addition to that, having this much assistance opened doors to more assistance. Social workers and care organizations got involved, as much as I hated being seen as the invalid I am, it was time to accept offers of help wherever they showed up.

And then, finally, after years of work, it was time.


ASSESSMENT 2: THE REASSESSENING

I was assessed separately for ADHD and Autism, and to my great fortune, was seen by people who cared about their jobs and were not trying to meet a quota of failed diagnosis attempts set by government supervillains to keep sick people out of benefits. They both knew what my deal was with a glance, and worked very hard to give me all the documentation I would need to begin the process of applying for state assistance. 

Around this time, my relationship with my jobcenter was worsening. I was being batted back and forth between more of these tedious work training courses and various other flaming turd hoops to jump through, when gradually I became aware of whispers of "work trials" on the horizon. What is a work trial, I hear you ask? What are you doing in my home, I answer. And also this is what that is:

It goes without saying that you can't just make people work for free, even to "earn" their benefits. Well, it doesn't go without saying, it had to be said. Work labour laws had to be put in place to prevent it, because that's literally slavery. But, TECHNICALLY, there's nothing illegal about hiring ANOTHER company to make welfare recipients do "work training", and giving them carte blanche to add whatever stipulations they decide as criteria for completing the course, including... working for free. 

So, the job center can't say to me, "hey, you wanna keep getting this insanely small quantity of free money, go work a normal person job that would normally pay you, like, 800 times that amount". But the job center CAN say "hey, you wanna keep getting this money, you have to comply with your obligations, such as doing work training courses to make absolutely sure you know how to write a CV", and then that work training course can say "hey, so we get to decide what counts as you doing this course, and we cut a deal with a bunch of soulless corporations and we've decided that it's good work training for you to work for free".

And boom, bob's your uncle's neice, now you're a slave. Now you, someone who is in this position because you physically can't work, are being handed all the responsibilities and duties of a full time 9 to 5, with none of that money stuff you hear about. 

I had managed to stave this off a few times in the past, and laws and rules would change as people with consciences tried to stem this abhorrent practice, while people without would keep finding new ways to rebrand it and bring it back in. I had escaped literal slavery by the skin of my teeth multiple times, and now, yet again, it was looming larger than ever before.

By the way, if anyone out there is currently looking for work and wondering why it's so hard to find any, ask yourself what you would do if you were a corporation that could either legitimately hire people and pay them a normal wage, or keep receiving an endless glut of free workers sent over by job training courses that you can use up and throw away like crumpled coke cans. There's irony for you. These soulless bureaucrats in their pitiless attempts at forcing everyone into work, are creating a scenario where all the work is being done and still no one has any fucking jobs. Go figure, right?

An overhaul of the benefits system was on the way, and that usually means cutting benefits or making it so unbearable to be on benefits that you give up and brave the streets, because they don't see the end goal as getting people into work, they just see it as stopping people from claiming benefits. The worrying glares I received from many of the faces I had come to know well at my jobcenter all pointed to an oncoming storm, this new "improved" version of the benefits systems, streamlined into what they would call "universal credit", would hit the impoverished like a righteous tidal wave, cleansing the nation of its shameful problem of having human beings who are allowed to both be alive and also not very functional. Work trials were inevitably going to be a part of that.

So I'm back in crisis mode, the clock is devouring its diminishing supply of ticks like a starving pacman, and I have to attempt to get on disability benefits before the whole system blows up on me. At least if I do that, maybe I can be grandfathered into the new system with the privileges they no doubt seek to strip away from newer applicants. I have my diagnoses, an achievement that moved me more than I ever expected. There are two systems I can apply to, one called PIP (Personal Independent Payment), which is separate from the normal government systems, and the disability version of Universal Credit, which I am expecting to be an Orwellian horror. I have been advised that already having PIP can make your UC application stronger, and if nothing else it is a kinder system, and with that support maybe I can still survive even if UC totally screws me.

So, I had arranged my deck, and now I had to play it. 


ASSESSMENT 3: THIS TIME IT'S ASSESSONAL

My energy levels are falling and it turns out making a semi-jokey blog post about the emotional rollercoaster that has been your entire turgid life isn't as fun as it sounds. So, let's go with the cliff notes. My dad went with me to my first assessment with PIP. He told them my life story from his point of view. He cried. He said he wanted my life to be better. I haven't seen him like that since his own father died. I realised in that moment that maybe I'm not just looking for an unscratched spot on the ass of the world to stick my bloodsucker into... maybe I do really need.... maybe deserve help?

I didn't know I had imposter syndrome until someone ripped off my mask and revealed a genuinely hurt and traumatised little boy who never got to be a kid and will never get to be an adult. It was at that moment I felt decades of other people's judgements and opinions come oozing out of my head like pus from a diseased wound. All that time, I had, on some level, felt like a fraud. And when I tried and failed, I just saw it as my own fault. But what does it mean for it to be your fault you failed, if you really tried?

The assessment was successful. I was forced to see myself through the eyes of someone who can speak with authority on the fact that I needed help to survive. Although it took a dog's age, eventually I qualified and started receiving my PIP payments. The amount of cash was lower than I even started with back at the start of all this mess, but it made my jobseeker payments look like a handful of empty sweet wrappers and a few pebbles by comparison. Even if I had to stay on jobseekers, with the help of PIP, I now had the means to MAYBE survive a little longer.

Then, eventually, after a great deal more highly redundant work, came my UC assessment. This was the one I had been dreading. A fear tempered only slightly by hearing that the people making these assessments were independently hired. Perhaps less stench of agenda, then, than I had expected to cloud the interview. It went well. My first hint of that was when they didn't need to go into great detail about any of the more physical health problems I have, which are plenty (as would they be for you, if you've been living in a dump and counting pebbles your whole life), which indicates they thought my neurological issues alone were enough.

I got the decision a few days ago, and shortly thereafter, a small first payment, backdated to the day I applied. Even the heartless government, after seeing all the evidence I accumulated since starting at square one, eventually had to admit that clearly, I am in need of some small mercy.

Gone were the obligations, gone were the constant lessons on how to compose a fucking CV, done with the work trials. The weekly appointments, that sword perpetually waiting to drop, now a rusted relic on the wall. I have, and I say this tentatively, as some part of my brain will now forever be anticipating the drop of that other shoe, reached the point I set out to reach all those years ago.

I am back at square one. And what a lovely square it is. I can live, not as comfortably as anyone who works, but maybe that's fair. I would work to earn if I could, and it's not my fault I can't, but it still seems wrong for me to make as much as someone who has to put their back into it while I am afforded the luxury to recline on mine. An image all too often conjured in the frothing minds of those who think everyone on benefits are just lazy, entitled brats resting on the laurels of their participation trophies. 

Well, you decide. Granting me the benefit of doubt as to my honesty, you have seen my story from my perspective. Does it sound to you like an especially privileged experience? Do you picture my days as wallowing in a mudpit of luxury while naked cherubs piss money onto my head? Or do you think I went through some measure of hell, to get to where I am now? Of all the changes I have experienced these last months, I think the biggest one is that, right there. An internal change. No longer viewing myself as a parasite, no longer hating myself for consuming the shoe-string budget life had permitted me. No longer feeling like I am taking something that doesn't belong to me.

One of my heroes, after whom this blog post's name is mischievously patterned, has taught me that no matter how bad your trauma, or how heavy your burden... you can get better. You can do better, you can BE better. And wherever you may be on that journey... you DESERVE better. You are enough. It's 11.34pm right now. I turn 38 in 26 minutes. But I already received my birthday present. An achievement I worked my whole ass ass off for. I have rediscovered myself at 37, and what I discovered is that it's okay not to be okay, and it's okay to WANT to be okay. You're allowed to try, you're allowed to fail, and you're even allowed to succeed.

I'm not a parasite. I may be defective but I still have a lot to offer, in whatever ways I can. And I am not robbing the world by taking my space within it as I find my way.

Maybe I don't deserve this. But I sure fucking earned it.

The Karen Cancel Culture Cabaret

I know I haven’t touched this thing but in a long while, but thanks to the cowardice of the YouTube algorithm I’ve been stuck with content that gets immediately deleted when posted in the intended place. 

Incidentally I’m also in Facebook jail for 7 days right now because calling a racist “trash” and saying “men suck” in a thread about guys who gaslight sexual assault victims are apparently examples of me “bullying”. So I’m quite the popular villain at the moment.

I composed this comment in the comments section of Jenna Marbles’ farewell video to YouTube, in which she breaks down in tears over the laundry list of “problematic” things she has done over the years as compiled by a gaggle of Karens seeking their latest fix of vindictive celebrity takedown.

https://youtu.be/y9xrmuVSbiw

Tell me cancel culture isn’t real or harmful now, you toxic animals. You enforce this theatre of outrage and tokenisms, farming righteous anger to feed a starving Id, and all of it so tastelessly synthetic. Raking people over coals eternally for finite, distant mistakes like some deranged biblical deity, dehumanising and deplatforming people to scratch a perverse itch for this week’s “problematic people” gossip and throwing them away like they never mattered. 

This is what you do. Your extremism, your tribalism, your uncritically critical nature in service to the same dark drives which causes the very things you find problematic. When you tear people down not so that they can learn, but for the sadistic joy of it. Accusing everyone of such sparsely defined bigotry that you remove the weight of bigotry itself and thus empower the bigoted, while the innocent and well meaning fall apart in tears thinking they are the monster. This is what you do. 

Every time one of you mounted the latest bandwagon, sent vitriol to whoever Twitter trends told you to hate. Every time you mindlessly followed the herd and accepted accusations without proof, rejected apologies as insincere, and tried to conflate anyone who transgressed the smallest threads you had spun into your labyrinthine webs with the most hateful of people, this is the culture you built.

You wanted to be judge, jury and executioner. You wanted to all be the dictator of wokeness despite the myriad paradoxes that entails. You wanted to be thought police. You don’t get to complain when your disgusting, ignorant, elitist, self aggrandising hatefulness brings down someone you actually like. 

You don’t get to mourn her. You don’t get to feel sad that your favourite YouTube personality is gone. She’s the one traumatised. She’s the one trying to reconcile her desire to be a good person with the toxic bullying culture you created that has suffocated her mind with beliefs that she’s a terrible person because she couldn’t live up to an impossible and ever-shifting standard which is never defined.

You don’t get to feel bad because the regime of vicious, unsympathetic harassment of the “problematic” cast a shadow so broad it finally touched someone you love. If you were really decent people, you wouldn’t wait until it affects you to start caring. You would feel bad for the masses of broken-hearted, deeply hurt people your campaign accepted as collateral damage in your self righteous purging of the wrongthink.

You took genuine, important parts of the social mechanisms of progress... empathy for the downtrodden, advocacy for the powerless, trigger warnings for the scarred, and you weaponised them. You twisted humanitarianism into a thunderdome in which you could send an endless stream of branded bad guys to the lions in the name of making the world better, and all you succeeded in doing was creating more hate and more hurt.

The world needs awareness of minority prejudice. The world needs to know that Black Lives Matter, not pretending that dressing up as a celebrity is the same thing as a fucking minstrel show. The world needs less animal cruelty, not picking people apart for every time they have been less than 100% perfect as an animal parent. The world needs less hurtful language, not more language branded hurtful and then used to indict regardless of context.

You take situations without harm and invent it in order to give yourselves the excuse to be harmful, and THIS IS THE FUCKING RESULT. You are not the warriors of social justice, you’re just soldiers. And like so many soldiers throughout history, you don’t even care what cause you’re fighting for or if it is just. You just want an excuse to persecute. And none works better than claiming the persecution for yourself.

That’s why you’re no better than your targets. Your hate isn’t any more noble than theirs. Your hunger to hurt others comes from exactly the same place, you’ve just found a more insidious outlet. So don’t you fucking complain when someone you love gets sent to the gulags. You fucking built them, and you knew *exactly* what you were doing when you did it.

The Simplicity of Debate

This is a compilation of a series of articles I will be writing on the subject of debate methodology and its application to normal, everyday discussion. The focus will not be on just copy-pasting the same dry, esoteric data you would find in a wikipedia article, but rather in presenting that knowledge in a format that could be easily understood by the layman. The purpose of debate is not to be the BEST at doing it; the purpose is to get to the truth. To present your ideas honestly, and to try to critically analyse both positions in an intelligent way. What I am trying to do with this series is to present people with the tools to do that, and a simple explanation of why and how they are useful.

Techniques

Beyond knowing what the correct argument names and fallacy titles are, there is a more important aspect to debate; technique. There are many different techniques harkening from methodologies scientific and philosophical. Personally, I like to utilize a combination of empiricism, the Socratic method, and strict syllogistic logic as my debate technique, though everyone has their own flair and approach.

As part of this article series I will be spotlighting other techniques, both good and bad, and explaining why they should or should not be used, and how to effectively counter them. Remember that the most important technique of all is making every effort to be reasonable. There is nothing to gain from being evasive. If you’re in the right, no amount of honest answers to honest questions can make you be wrong.


Technique spotlight #1 Syllogistic logic

The most basic and general technique is the use of syllogistic logic. Don’t be put off by the fancy word; it’s actually really simple and easy to learn. A syllogism is kind of verbal formula that enables you to reach conclusions in a strictly logical manner. It doesn’t require a ton of memorization or skill in mathematics. It usually consists of two or more premises and a conclusion, and the argument has to be structured such that the conclusion naturally follows from the premises.

Premise 1: All men are mortals

Premise 2: Churchill was a man

Conclusion: Churchill was a mortal

This syllogism makes sense, as you can see. It’s a series of statements where, if you accept the first two, you absolutely cannot deny the third one. Just like 2+2=4. It might sound complex when other people talk about syllogistic forms, but the reality is, breaking things down to an equation like this actually makes it a lot easier to be highly logical. If you had just tried to argue that Churchill was mortal, it would be a much more complicated discussion, but if you can get everyone to agree that all men are mortal, the argument proves itself.

All syllogistic argument forms follow this basic template. Fallacies are identified chiefly by their deviation from that logic. Any time a fallacy is in play, there is some reason why one of the premises did not lead to the conclusion. The only way to reasonably counter a syllogistic argument is to participate in the syllogism and demonstrate where, if ever, it goes awry. Thankfully the nature of syllogistic logic makes this really easy to do.

An argument can be both valid and sound. Soundness pertains to the truth of the argument, whereas validity merely refers to whether it makes sense. Meaning that in a valid argument, it’s true that IF you concede the premises, then the conclusion naturally follows, irrespective of whether or not the premises are actually true. In this context, it doesn’t matter what is objectively true, we are just talking about whether it follows logically. For instance:

Premise 1: All men have wings

Premise 2: Churchill was a man

Conclusion: Churchill had wings.

In this case the argument was valid, because IF all men have wings, then Churchill must have wings too, but it isn’t sound, because the premises cannot be demonstrated to be correct. This argument is strictly hypothetical, and under that hypothetical scenario, the conclusion would be accurate. Actually, both arguments were, but that gets into negative claims and burden of proof, which I will be covering later.

Being able to justify the premises is a large part of debate, and this is what is referred to as empiricism. A more scientific approach to the same thing. Under the empirical model, I need to be able to EXPERIENCE the truth of your claim, ideally to be able to test it, before I can concede to your conclusion. Sometimes this truth is evidentiary, for instance historical documentation, scientific studies, etc. Other times the evidence can be tautological, which means that by definition it must be true, such as “all men are men” or “all bachelors are unmarried”.

If one objects to a premise, they must also be able to logically refute it. If they don’t, they must, by virtue of the nature of logic, concede the argument. So, you see, having a valid argument isn’t always the end of the discussion. If you’re dealing with verifiable claims about reality, you still need to be able to prove your case when challenged. And if you’re at the other end of a syllogism, you have to be willing to actually hear that proof.

Knowing how to arrange that evidence into a syllogistic form will make both your argument; and your ability to rationally defend it much stronger. It also enables you to be more easily corrected when your “math” doesn’t add up, and being able to find out when you’re wrong is one of the most important aspects of any debate. Unfortunately, you can’t make anyone else accept that they are wrong, even when they are.

You can’t make someone accept your premises, no matter how harmless or obvious they may be. In fact, when people start to see where the argument is going, in my experience, they tend to want to derail the syllogism by just flatly ignoring what you’re saying or rejecting premises that are easily justifiable. You can’t make them listen, but you can clearly set up the formula such that if they refuse to play ball, they expose their own unreasonableness.

The bottom line is: people who are in the right don’t fear syllogisms. Why would you? Why would you fear something that breaks the debate down into something simpler, easier to understand, and turns it into a situation where only the correct answer can be concluded? The more confident that you are in your overall argument, the more you should be ecstatic to use such a convenient tool for demonstrating this. Nothing untrue can come from a syllogism that follows logical, non-fallacious structure with justified premises. Nothing. And if there are fallacies and weaknesses, the syllogism makes it EASIER to point it out.

Only the wilfully ignorant, the wrong, and the weak fear them. Don’t be on that list.

What matters most is that YOU honestly adhere to this method. Make every effort to be reasonable, accommodating, patient, and to give every premise a fair chance. When someone else gives up on the debate, just let them go and find someone more willing to be honest. So long as you followed good logical structure, you know you were in the right.

It’s worth remembering that you can’t practise this technique too much. It is immensely useful. Give it a try! Take your favourite debate topic, and try to arrange it into a series of “if, then” statements. “If” your premises naturally lead to your conclusion, and “if” your premises are supported with evidence? “Then” you know that your argument is logical. And you can be sure I’m right, because I just did it! It’s that easy.

                                                                                                                                                                 

Fallacies

One of the most important tools of debate is the understanding of fallacies, and to that end I will be spotlighting several of the most common ones in the following articles. The first thing you need to understand about fallacies is that they are merely an argument that does not make sense. This doesn’t mean the user’s stance on the topic is wrong or right, it simply means they used a very bad argument for demonstrating it. For instance, if I say I like bacon, and you ask me to prove it, if I were to say “Gordon Ramsey likes bacon so it must be good”, I haven’t proved MY case, I proved an entirely different one. This has no bearing on whether I do like bacon.

Not everyone can be an expert on all fallacies or argument types, and it can be problematic sometimes when someone is trying to honestly convey their views, and rather than having it explained to them why they may be wrong, people just sling obscure fallacy names at them that mean nothing to that person. It can be used as a tool to intimidate, overwhelm, or shame, when the truth is there is nothing wrong with not being well-versed in the entire field of formal debate and syllogistic argument, just so long as you are willing to be reasonable. Trust me; I’m the loser who spends all his time studying this stuff. It doesn’t reflect negatively on you if you’re not as sad as me.

Other times, people attempt to imitate those who do this by trying to invoke fallacies without fully understanding what they mean, and sometimes just see the fallacy name itself as a shut-down on the conversation. For instance, Appeal to Authority. Yes, this is a fallacy, but that doesn’t mean any time someone cites an authority they are being fallacious. It’s only a fallacy if the authority cannot be demonstrated as valid. There is a lot more to fallacies than just their names, and that’s one of the most important things to learn about them. Appeal to Ignorance doesn’t mean you’re ignorant, Slippery Slope isn’t just ANY slippery slope-type argument, but only those where the conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow.

But I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information in the first article, so here’s the most important thing I want you to take away from this. Before the argument structures and the fallacies and all that jazz, there is one most important aspect to any debate. A skill that, if you can master it? Means you don’t NEED any of that other stuff. And that is being willing to really listen, and ensure that what you, or anyone else is saying, truly makes sense. It doesn’t matter if you know what the correct fallacy name is for a flawed argument – if you can see that it is flawed, simply explain the flaw to them. If someone explains a flaw in your argument? Be willing to hear them out.

If something doesn’t make sense to you, ask for clarification. Ask forty times if necessary. Keep asking until you understand, because that’s the point. Keep giving honest, direct answers when others ask you questions. If your goal is to get to the truth, whatever it may be, there is no trap someone could set for you that would tarnish that truth – because it is what it is, and isn’t what it isn’t. If you don’t have the necessary data to support your position? That’s okay. You can take a break and go gather it. So long as you are always willing to be open to the possibility that you are wrong, and willing to hear out what other people say, eventually the truth will out. And nobody honest ever had anything to fear from the truth.

Debate is ultimately a form of communication. If we aren’t willing to communicate, there is no point in trying to debate. Seek a point of mutual understanding, and the rest will generally sort itself out.

What follows is the first fallacy spotlight in this series:

Fallacy Spotlight #1: Strawman

This is probably one of the most basic and commonly understood logical fallacies in all of debate, so it is highly likely that most of the people reading this will have some understanding of how it works. That said; this is the kind of thing that anyone can easily fall prey to, so it really doesn’t hurt to give yourself the occasional refresher, and keep it in the back of your mind as you debate.

The strawman is, in simplest terms, a misrepresentation of the opponent’s argument. So, if I say I like red, and you say “so you don’t like blue?” that’s a strawman. Even if it SEEMS implied, if it hasn’t been stated, then it is not the point being debated, and bringing it up is an irrelevancy. It can be the smallest alteration you make, but so long as it either reframes your opponent’s argument or seems to unfairly characterize them, it’s a strawman. The term comes from the idea of actually constructing a straw effigy of an enemy, one easier to defeat than fighting the real version.

In politics, there is one topic in particular that is, by design, rigged up as a perpetual, unilateral strawman right from the start. Abortion. Consider how the two sides of this argument are characterised? “Pro-life” or “Pro-choice”. Granted, this isn’t the form that a strawman argument NORMALLY takes. Normally you would say that someone else is X, rather than say that you are Y, but the way it sets up the debate is it forces the opponent into the position of being anti-Y.

Everyone is pro-choice, and everyone is pro-life. These are two of the most emotionally charged, positively-themed words in the English language. Invoking the elementally human concepts of freedom, and not being dead. My pointing this out isn’t meant to imply that there are no good arguments on either side, because of course there are. The point is; we try to paint each other in the worst colours before the debate can even begin, and that’s classically symptomatic of the way strawmanning is employed across all of debates. In the example I just used, it can also be considered "poisoning the well", which is a fallacy where you try to set someone up to look bad before they even say anything.

We have to be mindful of the way we represent each other. If someone explains their position to you, and you reply with “so you’re saying ___” if what follows is ANYTHING other than exactly what they said? You’ve already failed at the fundamental first step of communication. You shouldn’t need to tell someone else what they are saying at all. If they have just told you, all you need to do is respond to it. Repeating it exactly is redundant, and repeating it inexactly is just a recipe for misrepresentation, whether deliberate or not.

Try to remember that everyone thinks they are in the right, and pretty much everyone thinks they are reasonable. There are no villains twirling their moustaches trying to be in the wrong. If someone believes something you can’t even begin to rationalize, either you know something they don’t, they know something you don't, or you don’t actually understand what they believe. The worst thing you can do is tell someone else what their position is. If you think something seems odd, ask.

You wouldn’t like someone to beat up a scarecrow with your face painted on it and declare they defeated you in a fight. So don’t do the same to them. If you have to change what someone says in order to find a flaw in it, that’s because you can’t find a flaw in what they ACTUALLY said. And in that situation, the most intellectually honest thing to do is re-evaluate your own opinion of them. We shouldn’t be looking for ways to rig the fight so everyone who disagrees with us looks terrible. We should be looking for ways to figure out whose positions are the most reasonable. Taking the time to truly and honestly understand your opposition is not only the most respectful thing you can do – but it’s also the best way to get an equally fair and honest response.

Intellectual honesty has the highest return on investment. If you are always honest, then you either get proved wrong, and learn something new, or get proved right, and educate someone else. There is no defeat if your goal is to get to the truth.

Fallacy Spotlight #2: Tu Quoque or not Tu Quoeue?

Since this fallacy keeps coming up a lot at the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to do the next spotlight on “Tu Quoque”. Anything with a Latin name tends to scare people, but this isn’t some obscure elitist thing you need special training to understand. It literally means “you also”, and it refers to situations where people respond to an argument by pointing out some kind of hypocrisy in the person or side who made it. Think children arguing in a school yard going “nahuh, you are!”

This happens a LOT in politics – in fact, it’s become such a common pastime it’s developed its own political spinoff, “whataboutism”. What happens every time someone criticizes Trump? “What about Obama?” What happens when you criticise Obama? “What about Bush”, and so on and so on. Instead of addressing the criticism of the individual that has been offered, people have started just pointing out that some other individual on the opposite “team” has also done something similar.

This is especially problematic because there aren’t just two “teams” in politics, and it is disingenuous to act as if any individual is representative of a whole. We spent years hashing this out with respect to race, religion and gender, now we’ve just jumped to politics instead. Criticising something a Democrat does, doesn’t make you a “Republican”, nor does it clarify what KIND of Republican you may be, nor does it mean that you are in favour of Republicans doing the same thing that this Democrat did to earn your critique. Likewise if the roles are reversed. Why WOULD it mean any of that?

If I say to you, “I hate ice cream because it’s too cold”, you wouldn’t reply with “yeah, but winter is cold too!” You would look like a crazy person. First of all, for defending an accusation against ice cream by deflecting to talking about something utterly unrelated. Secondly, for apparently assuming I’m being hypocritical because I must love winter, when I never said I did, and third, because… seriously, just… who talks like that? It doesn’t make SENSE. It sounds so achingly insecure and whiny, it really is just the childhood “but mooom, he started it!” It doesn’t even address the criticism being made – which may not even MERIT addressing. Why does an accusation have to be defended just because you claim the team that perpetrated it?

Whataboutism is, as I said, kind of an off-shoot. Generally speaking Tu qupque is just pointing out that someone supposedly is acting hypocritical to their point. Before modern politics turned into a thunderdome, this fallacy didn’t use to come up all that much, because even the most irrational people tend to be capable of recognizing immediately how dumb it looks. It only tends to happen in situations where there are only two possible sides to an issue, so attacking one implicitly means you side with the other, even though almost nothing is really that black and white.

However, pointing out hypocrisy isn’t ALWAYS a fallacy, and that’s an important distinction to keep in mind. If you say to me “meat is bad for you” while eating a hamburger, I can’t use the fact that you’re eating it as a weakness in your argument. No one said that believing meat is bad for you means you WON’T eat it, so it doesn’t address the argument (which is JUST that meat is bad for you) for me to point this out. You may not be acting consistently with your own viewpoint, but that doesn’t make your argument wrong. This makes tu quoque an “ad hominem” fallacy, where you attack the person making the argument, rather than the argument.

If, however, you were to say “no reasonable person can eat meat because it’s bad for you”, then my pointing out the fact that you’re eating meat DOES refute your argument. Or at least it demonstrates that by your own criteria, you are not reasonable. If someone concedes to being unreasonable, even if they did it by defining themselves into a corner – they can NO LONGER participate in a debate until resolving that contradiction. Debate is based entirely around people being receptive to reason. This is still an ad hominem attack, but not an ad hominem fallacy, because it is not logically fallacious when you have made character part of the equation.

Personally, I’ve never understood whataboutism. I’ve never felt the need to employ it. If I see someone doing something worthy of criticism, my first instinct is not to analyse the person doing it, see whether or not they are on my “team” and how best to work this into my political agenda, and then contrive a response that either shames or saves face depending on that person’s position relative to mine. This “soccer team” mentality, where we defend our heroes and condemn our enemies no matter what, is nothing more than a pollutant to the process of debate.

That would be so dishonest, it literally wouldn’t even occur to me. And yet I see people doing this all over the political spectrum every single day, and that seriously concerns me. If I see someone doing something wrong – I JUST condemn it, regardless of who did it. I don’t point out that someone else did it, I don’t try to defend it. I condemn it. Because that’s the right thing to do. Because something doesn’t become less wrong just because it’s “my” guy who did it, or because it has been done before by worse people. The intellectually honest thing is to act blind to all of that and judge the situation by its merits alone.

In my opinion, if your instinct is to do anything other than that – you need to recalibrate your sense of reason and learn to put your own agenda BEHIND a wall of intellectual honesty. Nobody is right about everything all the time, so if your instinct to protect your case is in any way a higher priority than your ability to reason, you are putting yourself in the worst position possible. The position of being wilfully ignorant.

If we were all more willing to condemn, without excuses or deflections, that which can be demonstrated to be wrong, then we will all be holding each other to higher standards. And by holding EVERYONE to those standards, surely people would be less inclined to do wrong in the first place. Wouldn’t that make your “side” a side that is actually WORTH standing by?

My Fault

Sometimes, in the dead of night, when the lights knowingly slink away and wicked thoughts come scuttling from the shadows with a nocturnal hunger, I will find myself lying there. Awake, silent, yet pinned down by the weight of a restless mind. Not in deep contemplation, or mile-a-minute thought... I mean yes, that happens too, but that is the norm. Sometimes, just sometimes... I lie there in the stillness, and feel my conscience... burn. Insatiable consuming cinders form a canopy behind my eyes, an explosion desperately trying to become.

It burns with everything I long to do. It burns with all that I know I never can do. It blazes unbearably with this uncontainable persistence, like a force of nature compelling itself, irrepressibly, against a tarring counterforce, the unbreakable chains that deny it. As I burn, I am also lost. Ribbon-thin razor wire binding the wolf in my mind, entangling and enveloping ideas in the labyrinthine web of broken neural circuits and a fizzing electric field that groans with undiffused frustration. The passages my thoughts long to find never quite connecting, never managing to conduct from idea to action.

This burning boils and cracks my shell until all the fuel is expended and my will breaks yet again to this nightly torture session. Heat drains away and the overheated circuits run cold as frustration gives way to apathy. But still it sits there... braying, urging, stabbing. I can give up hope, but I cannot silence the compulsion. A tangible need to be, bending reality against itself like two immutable stone facts standing in opposition to one another. I live in contradiction, tilting at the windmills in my own mind. I am, but can never be. I will, but live as a ghost.Were it an enemy I would submit, but the face of my tormentor is my own, and how he relishes the neverweres.

The paralysis of mind. How could I ever convey that experience to one untouched by its venom? To know what you want to do, what you need to do, but honestly not be able to do it. To have nobody and nothing to blame but yourself and the unconscious choices your treacherous brain makes against your will. Is it worse than the worst form of bodily paralysis? No. Is it even in the same ballpark as serious mental retardation or agonizing genetic disease? Not at all. It is merely different. The phantom nature of my demon, however. The cruel way it hides from view and disguises its meddling, that's what can bring a man to tears. I am just normal enough to have no valid excuses, and just broken enough to be unable to ever rise above my limits.

But I don't say this as a cry for help. I'm not seeking empty "you'll be okay"s or "believe in yourself"s. Sympathy is something I never cared for, learning quickly not to befall that tricky safety net. More often than not, every supportive remark is delivered by the back of the hand. Using praise to justify trivialization. Trying to explain over and over what effect this problem has on me to various unconvinced faces can only get you so far. Beyond that, you pretty much have to grin and bear it when they wipe their feet at the doormat of your rotting mind and call it a fixer-upper.

The worst part is not knowing how to battle it. There's this wall that separates you from everyone, an insurmountable "never" that sets you a plane apart from any possible insight another person might have. Advice will find its way to you, words of wisdom that attempt to motivate while inadvertently belittling the challenge. "Have you tried having a positive attitude?", "Well, you got this far, so clearly it's not THAT bad", "Stop worrying about it and just do it!". The experiential wall widens, each attempt at helping, or motivating you, chips away another tiny piece of your will to keep fighting. How do you tell someone who is honestly trying to help that they're just making it worse?

No problem can simply be wished away, no matter how internalized it may be. It's great when someone tells you that they believe in you, it really is. But when it comes packaged with the expectation that you will miraculously leap from your mental wheelchair because they said so, all they have given you is a chance to disappoint someone new. Attitude is important, this is true, but that's only the software. When mental problems are concerned, people tend to forget that the hardware matters just as much, if not more. Except there's nothing you can do about that. So where do you start? How do you set about rewriting the code of your own mind?

Really, it quickly descends to just putting out fires. You spend your life treating the symptoms. Lack of organization skills breed a messy and cluttered home life, which then further compounds the issues of poor memory and withering motivation, as one needs to know and remember where one wants things to be, and then compel oneself to put them there. But like adding to a pile of sand everything you fix in place crumbles again because you were never organized enough to do a good enough job, and you can't multitask or anticipate the next collapse, so you're constantly stuck on one simple yet somehow eternal task while the rest pile up higher and higher behind you.

At the same time your mind is clumsily juggling with those little, insignificant tasks that everyone else seems to find so simple. Remembering appointments, obligations, learning the new systems and locales that are all linked in with this mess and trying to keep a mental map of how it all interrelates. It's like trying to juggle with people who are, themselves, juggling.

Inevitably you find that one thing can't be done until another thing is done first, and that thing is codependent with another thing which further requires an extra thing to be done at the same time as another thing which is somehow part of the thing you want to get done in the first place. Before you know what's happening a simple mission like buying groceries or cleaning a room descends into this Tomb Raider-esque quest to obtain the golden key to open the gate to get the map to find the statue to point the way to find the treasure and it all just becomes way more of an ordeal than it should. And every appointment or birthday lost to the chaos along the way is your fault and becomes a further source of drag on this endless labour.

It seems so easy for other people. They seem to just sail through the things I cannot wrap my mind around with insulting ease. But they're built for it, like Newton was built for math. I'm sure that seemed easy for him, too. I'm built differently. Some things I excel at, but others, particularly those simple little things, just don't fit correctly in my mind. I am not stupid. I just live, from my perspective, in a world of Newtons. I am not dumb, you're just all special and I'm not. And there's nothing I can do about it. I see these every day things as daunting, immovable obstacles, and as much positive affirmation as I throw at them, it's about as effective as commanding a rock to not be a rock.

And the best part is, this is all happening in your head. In the outside world, onlookers really just can't understand why you can't simply do this incredibly easy thing, and for the life of you, you really just can't understand how anyone else can. Is it just me over complicating matters? Perhaps, but then, that's the whole problem isn't it? How do I not think the way I do? I can't be anyone other than myself. I'm not choosing to do this, this is just how the process of thinking naturally happens in my brain.

But people can't understand this. They see what's wrong with you as a matter of low self-esteem, rather than actual disability, and so they will attempt to create arguments against your disability, as if they could define it out of existence on some technicality. Three times I have struggled (which is an understatement of such magnitude you will never comprehend) to a therapist's office only to go storming right back out because one of the first condescending remarks out of their mouth was "well you made it this far". BITCH, I don't need you to *refute* my problem, I needed help.

I don't need the fact that I hit rock bottom so hard I actually bounced up a few inches used AGAINST me like it somehow proves the magic was in me all along, the fuck you think this is a fairytale? These ableist responses probably evolved to common practise in a positively Darwinian sense because their priority is not to get you better, it's to get you to stop coming back. That's the victory in the government's eyes. Doesn't matter if people are homeless or depressed or dead, just so long as they are not using their healthcare, benefits or entitlement services, we get to say we're combating the problem.

From strangers, "Well, you seem very intelligent", is the one I get the most. Thanks for telling me that people with disabilities = stupid people to you, I guess? Coping mechanisms make struggles invisible, being brave makes the spiritually crippling marathon of turning up to an appointment look like no big deal, To get taken seriously you end up having to exaggerate just to show them what's really going on inside, because people simply refuse to accept what they can't see, and then you just feel dishonest. Refusing to be dishonest in that way strands you, like a mortal having to fight alongside the gods, and you have nobody to blame but yourself when you fail. The hardest part of all is accepting the help you need when you are finally presented with it, because life mercilessly teaches you the opposite over and over, and that other people always let you down.
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Friends and family are the same way. They will say they understand while at the same time still holding you accountable for every mistake you make, and who can blame them? If you drop something and break it, YOU still broke it, even if you are genetically clumsy. If you forget something important it's STILL your doing. The division between the reality of your situation and what other people see through normal eyes, the very division between you and other people in general widens the closer you look until it is a vast chasm. A fault between you and everyone in your life.

Other times they will take your solemn confessions and holster them to use against you at a later time, and your vices become accusations used to put you down the moment you cross a line they aren't comfortable with. Failing that, they will compare you to others they know who also have disabilities, refusing to understand that these things are a spectrum of degrees and effects, never the same for two people. They'll tell you they once knew someone with your problem and they could do X or Y perfectly well. Well then they did not have the same problem, did they?

But that's how people are. The nicest of friends when they think you're not a threat, when they think you'll bend to their whims. But the second you say no, the instant they begin to suspect you're not an ornament in their friend collection, but a thinking being with thoughts and opinions of your own, a shaking rage overwhelms them, and suddenly everything you have shared with them becomes a weapon they will not hesitate to use against you. Sometimes I think the tribulations of being like us imparts a higher sense of honour than the average person is likely to develop. You need to have been restrained in order to appreciate freedom, and the people you would choose to spend it with.

They understand the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. They see non-existent motivation, and they understand it as being a vestige of the similar concept they know well as "laziness", not grasping that the lack of energy is against your will, that this "laziness" is forced. You say depression, and they hear "sad", despite the vast scales of difference between those two concepts. They see choice because they see things that they cannot assimilate into their reality, and can only comprehend it as something you desire. And so they tell me I am weak because I choose to be. That I give in to this, that I let it take me, and that if I really wanted out that want alone should be enough. It's all my choice.

Choice. Let me tell you about the choices I've made.

I was still quite young when I stood before a tribunal of dark, towering people, monolithic in their authority and porcelain in poker face, and pled as sincerely as I possibly could for them to reverse their decision to take my support away. A decision made by a doctor whose "45 minute thorough assessment" involved him asking me three questions and checking to see if I can carry a keyboard before declaring me fit to work. So I appealed, and I stood before that guiltless triumvirate. It took all the energy I could muster, but I was fighting for my own survival.

I told them under no uncertain terms that by doing so they would literally ruin my life. Despite my open heart their porcelain remained unmoved. But boy did I show them. Over a decade later and I have done literally *nothing* with my life. Looks like I proved myself right. Oh, how vindicated I feel. And occasionally suicidal. Understand that this is not an exaggeration. This is not casual hyperbole. I cannot accurately convey the extent to which I have done absolutely nothing but basically lie in a bed counting every excruciating second and meticulously filing each one away in my failure archives. I have literally. Done. Nothing. 

Here I am with my heart open again, and yet I can hear the frigid ricochet of my words carrying no purchase on some statuesque face out there. You CHOSE to do nothing with your life, this person says. Did I? Did I really? But what does it mean to choose something? Is it merely the act of decision? Because here I am, right now, deciding not to live this way. Can I now just sit back and watch my will unfold into some sort of mystical Rube-Goldbergian chain of events that delivers me to my goal?

Obviously not. Further than deciding, one must take action.

So what good does it tell me to say I made my choice? You’re damn right I did. Every single day, every second I am actively choosing to the contrary of how my life works out. But WILLING something does not make it happen. What we’re talking about here is EFFORT. But where does that come from? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? I am seriously, honestly asking. Because whatever it is, I don’t have it. I don’t even understand it. I am the mental equivalent of a diabetic, I don’t create my own insulin, this mysterious energy the rest of you seem to have. So I just lie there and burn with my will, unable, UNABLE to focus it into the actions I REALLY WANT TO DO.

I get it, I really do. I'm right there with you. My disability is literally indistinguishable from "laziness", to such a degree that I can't comprehend what laziness is. I don't understand it. I don't understand how to draw a border between that and the sort of externally imposed, uncontrollable lack of motivation I have. It makes me paranoid. I never know whether I'm not able to make myself do something because my brain is not co-operating with me, or because I'm in a "lazy mood". It's actually a tremendous source of anxiety for me, because how do I know if I'm using the disorder as an excuse when the reality is I just can't be bothered to do something? What IS that? What does it mean to not be bothered? Is it different from the way I am? I don't know.

So it drives me crazy, especially with everyone always assuming I AM just being lazy. So I try very hard to do everything I can do, and to try to resist conditioning myself to be even more lethargic than necessary simply through letting my mind atrophy through inactivity. I have to be constantly vigilant that my aversion to doing things doesn't start to manifest in my USING said disorder as a convenient excuse to not do things in the first place. There are so many layers of self-reinforcing confusion to this that I couldn't begin to disentangle them all, and the more I try the more I feel myself sliding closer to that terrifying atrophy.

It's a very real danger for me, I feel like I'm constantly at the edge of a precipice trying to grapple with these invisible, intangible, functionally identical concepts and keep them in order. If I allowed myself to not only use by disability as a valid REASON for why I don't do things, but also start abusing it as an excuse never to try, I think I would finally lose my grip and get lost in a place I may not come back from. Maybe that's even happened to me before. Maybe I'm already on borrowed time. And I feel the teeth of that nightmare always present at my back. An oblivion that forever waits that single fateful step away. A step I absolutely REFUSE to take - and yet, I am NOT in control.

So how am I choosing this?! THINK about what I’m saying, please, really process it. There’s a gigantic hurdle of ingrained associations and preconceptions that you need to vault over before it will even occur to you what I am actually saying here, and we need to get you over that hurdle together. Think logically about this. Think about what it is you think I am failing to do, versus the “excuse” you probably think I am leaning on as an explanation for not doing it. What is it that I am NOT doing? It’s not making a decision, we’ve established that. So if it’s effort, what SHOULD I be doing to secure this “effort” in order to complete these tasks?

Because that mechanism, right there, is what I am telling you I do not possess. I don’t have that bit of software you are loading into your brain right now. I do not have it. I cannot do what you do. It’s like telling a wheelchair-bound man to get up and dance. I just can’t. You might say it’s just because I don’t WANT to. I DO want to. This is me telling you I want to. You might say I’m just lazy. What does that mean? Is laziness CHOOSING not to get up from the wheelchair? Or can the wheelchair-bound man CHOOSE to get up and still not be able? What am I doing wrong? You might say I just need to become more disciplined.

Well, okay, fine. Let’s use discipline as your word for this mental insulin I seem to lack. How do I get discipline? PRACTISE I hear you scream.  But how do I practise when – when I CHOOSE to start practicing, the practising still doesn’t happen? How do I practise when the raw force of making myself go against the grain of this bad mental programming is so exhausting and agonising that it results in the psychic equivalent of a broken hip that sets me back by literally months?

Think about what I’m saying, because everything you, my phantom interlocutor, might be saying as a way to avoid admitting I have a hard limitation comes down to me ultimately not doing *something*, whatever you want to call it, that I am telling you I am genuinely trying to do. So at what point does it simply become a more plausible explanation that I simply DO have this limitation? I guarantee you I have tried every single solution you are trying to contrive right now, and a thousand more you will never be creative enough to think of. 

No amount of "choosing" makes this cycle simply stop. We're not talking about a conscious decision to NOT be motivated being made, and then following that, an action (or inaction). We are talking about the spark which incepts decision. The prime mover of mentality. It is that which is stolen from me. The primal, genetic urge to be. The very seed from which the IDEA of "acting" can sprout remains unsewn. Because of this, I am frequently unable to do even the things I WANT to do, let alone those things I am repelled by. Despite my love of writing, five minutes in and I am emotionally and spiritually drained as if I just performed surgery on a rollercoaster. THIS VERY BLOG POST took me four years to complete. Where is the choice in any of that?

It isn't procrastination when you WANT and are ACTIVELY TRYING to do something, and it just won't happen. And this is me being weak? Hardly. I am strong. I am strong despite myself. Or perhaps to spite myself. The part of me I hate. The part that I can't cut away, that begs me to stay asleep and never move a muscle. I walk in a body of lead, and am accused of weakness because my steps are slow and clumsy. How far would you get in such a body? How would YOU resist the numbing of a mind that doesn't allow thought and action to connect?

You have no idea the strength it takes someone like me to just appear average on our best day. You wouldn’t believe the mental gymnastics it takes just to get through the week for someone like me, and if you suddenly had my defects, you would be *paralysed* by them, because motherfucker, I’m dragging the moon wherever I go and while I can’t keep up with you, I can still, *sometimes* manage a gentle stroll. Think you could? The hell you could.

I am strong enough to resist what I know in my heart to be an addictive personality (and by that I don't mean people just love to be around me), despite not yet harbouring any real addictions. Strong enough to have never touched a drop of alcohol, never gone near a cigarette or tried any drugs, despite the constant dreams beckoning me to do so since I was a kid. Strong enough to resist the overpowering urge to "cut" that I've felt since that age, and which frequently flares up in my mind with the same thumping tenacity as the instinct to pull back from a steep ledge.

I am strong because I am weak. Because I have no choice. Because if I let myself have a "first time" with any of these items I know I will never have a last. I push these things out of my mind, these temptations that my weaker self longs for just to sample a new way to seek comfort. If I didn't, I probably wouldn't be here any more. So you see, I am strong, just strong enough to barely break even against my weakness. It isn't one or the other, that's a false idea. You can be both at the same time. And that's the problem.

I am torn open., bleeding will in buckets while holding myself together at the seams. Imagine trying to save money up with a giant hole in your pocket that drops everything you put in, and yet you have nowhere else to store it. I am fractured. A busted container barely able to maintain the flow of its own loss. What energy I CAN raise is expended in the eternal battle with myself, because this bleeding animal is so tired it just wants to crawl to familiar surroundings and die. How tired and dilapidated would you be if you had someone at your throat every day your whole life?

I have granted myself very few weaknesses, vices I will let myself indulge in: Food, which I kind of need to live so can't really avoid, sleep, same thing, caffeine, which sort of happened by accident, and those things all humans need and so cannot feasibly resist. All these things became in their own way addictions, staggeringly powerful drives that would almost dominate my spirit. The most likely reason for this is when a soul that is tired of life finds something that can bring a moment of joy or let you forget the struggle for just a few minutes, it doesn't want to let it go. So this is why I resist anything more. Why I will always resist temptation. Because if I ever slip, I may never recover. I'm always one bad day away from losing myself forever... and I have to wonder, what loss would that be?

Sometimes I feel ashamed to have such resent for life. Though my brain is broken and my body close behind, I am utterly infused with privilege. I live at the pinnacle age of human achievement, a point in history where things have literally never been better, and in a world where so many - most in fact are not privy to most of those privileges, I had the good fortune to be born into a nation (albeit a very silly one) that overflows with them. I try to live as small and unobtrusive life as possible, knowing I have already failed the human benchmark of trying to leave the world better than I found it - I at least try to limit the harm I will have caused as much as possible. And yet despite all this - I live a better life than Mesopotamian kings. Were there any Mesopotamian kings? I don't know, because I suck at history, but if there were, I'm better than them.

How dare I hate being alive this much? How dare I want to claw off this privileged skin and climb out of an existence so comfortable. I have clothing, a roof, I have access to stuff that resembles food and the crud needed to make it taste like it. I get to spend all day learning, absorbing information... even though my brain deletes it all so I have to learn it all again the next day... and again... and again and again and again... you get the idea, until some of it finally lodges in the cobwebs of my misfiring temporal lobe. I at least get to do that. I get to do whatever I want... and yet all I want is to fly away into a thoughtless twilight. How can I not fault myself for that?

I was never diagnosed with depression. I didn’t stay in any doctor’s office long enough for that to happen, which if you think about it is sort of an ironic symptom of the condition, to say nothing of my actual motivation problem. I didn’t care enough about my own wellbeing to get the things I knew were wrong with me sorted. But, although never diagnosed, I think it’s safe to say that considering I spent a good 4-6 years in a state of near-perpetual despair, that I was, in fact, a bit down. A bit blue. A touch under the weather. And if not for a particularly resilient couple of screws holding my collapsing foundations together, despite being pushed far in excess of their stress limits, I would have probably ended my life at a hundred different junctures. Ironically, you might even say I was too lazy to die.

You might find the 4-6 years thing a bit odd, but you see that’s very much what it’s like. You kind of go in and out. Despite seeming like some sort of timeless hell dimension, it also, quite paradoxically, didn’t seem like that much time had passed. Until I realised that I began the FINAL stage of my breakdown around 2011, and then it just sort of became 2015. The bits before, in the middle, and after are a blur. That’s the scary bit. I have vague memories of wondering around in this delirious state of semi-lucidity. I didn’t know what I was doing for much of it because my mind just wasn’t right. It’s like I wasn’t really me, just an empty autopilot program reacting to the random synaptic firing of memories and thoughts and trying to interpret them as commands.

I had allowed myself to drift into such mental atrophy through a combination of depression, mental paralysis and simply having concluded I no longer had any worth, that I restructured my every thought to be a pathological closed loop of continual rebooting and reminders of my own futility. By subjecting myself to a forced echo chamber of eternally magnifying pain, and not allowing myself to even WANT help, I had blown all my mental circuitry, stranding myself in a trance-like state of suggestibility. If you had told me to go left, I would have gone left. If you’d told me to go right, I would have gone right. If you had said nothing at all, I would have, and did (being a bit of a hermit) just sit still and wither as the years fell away.

People do this. They fall into depressions that hollow out their entire lives. Most of the time you’d never even hear about it because, like me, they were too far gone to even seek help. But at the same time, I really blame myself for most of it. Depression is utterly irrational, and I get that. Unfortunately I had a few convenient excuses that I could use to rationalize feeling “sad” and perpetuate my own self-constructed hell. Perhaps on any given day I could have just opened the door and walked out. Now I’ll never really know. All I know is the time I lost and the harm I caused myself through neglect. That, and the habits I formed. Human behaviour is viral. I’ve trained myself to periodically relapse into a self-destructive mental coma, and I have to constantly expend the mental effort to keep my slippery grip on the edge of the world.

It's also frustrating because obviously living the life of an incompetent failure (both words can be taken according to all of their definitions) I am going to end up depressed, and now the possibility of my being depressed is constantly being used to shoot down my claim that I have a motivational disorder (since lack of motivation is a symptom of depression). As if all you need to do is cheer me up and, poof, my brain will rewire itself. Depression is always going to go hand in hand with this, but I wasn't born depressed, and I WAS born incapable of exacting my own will. So my problem is real, and is dismissed because one of the symptoms of that problem can also cause it - it's sickeningly cyclical, because that also means depression is actually compounding the real problem while I at the same time get more depressed because people won't recognise that there is a real problem at the root of it.

So I'm fighting the world on multiple fronts while fighting myself from several vectors at the same time. A helix of contradictions, the man with an inability to organise, collect his thoughts and advocate for himself all while having no gas in the tank is then expected to educate further stone faces on what is and is not wrong with me. I am told not to diagnose myself and then also expected to correctly pick out from all of the millions of symptoms I have exactly the right ones to match their checklist diagnosis - thereby diagnosing myself, before they will even allow me to look for help - most of those symptoms I don't even realise are symptoms because they're just normal to me. I don't know what they want me to say because I need the help I am trying to get from them in order to even know what's wrong with me - what's a symptom and what's just me. 

And as I do all of this, my brain is working against me. Sapping away my will to fight even as I desperately search for some semblance of hope to cling to. I live with crushing depression in a world filled with distractions, colourful treats and soothing chemicals, which I can never touch. If you lived in a black, dark world and were told the only source of light you could ever see was inside a little box at your feet... how long could you go before taking just a peek? So tell me not that I desire weakness. That I don't try, That I secretly just want to live an easy life. If I did, I would have plenty of options to choose from. I just choose not to lose the dark world I know, because the light is too comforting to turn from. If I only took the easy path, I very likely wouldn't even be here.

You'd think it gets harder with age as this wears on you, but it actually gets easier. Those vices you already have become more firmly rooted, but the temptation to turn to other comforts gets duller and duller as you slowly stop believing in the concept of happiness. I've never accepted helping hands of any kind, or at least did so begrudgingly when I ended up having to. When you scarcely have the will to get out of bed in the morning, the idea of sinking further into sloth, depending on other people, feels very much like circling the drain. This has probably backfired, however, as never accepting help probably made my own journey through this much harder and slower than it needed to be.

And then... then there is the issue of self-worth. The desire to be something of some value in this world, to be accepted. Just the way you are. It's bad enough to feel so flawed that you don't fit anywhere, like a splinter in the skin of the world that it constantly tries to drive out. But then the question of "fixing" yourself comes up... and there are no words to convey how that makes you feel. The idea of taking medications, seeking help, being repaired. Understand, this... fault inside me... that IS me. It's my perspective, the broken lens through which I view the world. I don't know any other way to be. So when we talk of "fixing" that fault, we are talking about incising from this body the disease that is... me.

Can you understand the rejection inherent in that? Rejection from life itself, from the world, from my own self. For me to take such a drug, accept such a treatment... it would be like stepping into a suicide booth. I would be saying "This version of me tried. He did his best... but he wasn't good enough". I've tried so many times to explain the plethora of emotions that this idea drips with, but I can't. I don't think anyone could possibly understand it unless they have been put in that position. How do you hold up your hands and say to yourself, without compunction, that this thing, this being, this ME that I am... it wasn't enough. I can't do this alone. I can't be me. The world doesn't want me, doesn't need me. It wanted somebody else, and got me instead. That even on my best day I'm not enough.

So fix me. This is my fault. My weakness. Take this voice from my head, and put someone else in there. Someone who can do this better than me. Could you do it? Could you walk the black mile to the electric chair? And we're not even talking necessarily about the idea that I won't still be "me" afterwards. Maybe I would be. It's not about oblivion, it's about the fact that you tried your best. You worked with what you had, and you honestly, truly, tried to be the best YOU that you could be. And the result, this thing that you made, this person. That's the reject. That's what people are telling you can never be acceptable unless you give up trying to do it yourself. Unless you augment it.

The best that I can be. And it will never be enough. I need drugs to make me whole? Then would I really be me if I took them, or would I be something that someone else built out of pathetic string and straw that was all I gave them to work with? I know that, functionally, it's no different than a crippled person needing a crutch. People take medications for all sorts of things, and I am NOT saying that reflects negatively on them. Obviously the diabetic is not inferior because they need insulin, and intellectually I understand this. I'm not saying my logic is sound, only that this is the thought process I go through. Irrational though it may be. Because, you see, a diabatic is not their disease. ...I am.

He/she is a person, a self wrapped up in their disease. My disease is my own self. My mind. I am cancer. It's sort of like going through years of professional art schooling, and then only being able to paint something that your mother barely finds worthy to put on the fridge like a child's scribbling. At the bottom of the fridge. Underneath someone else's picture. I don't want my epitaph to be "He tried". I don't want to know that I will be forever unworthy of the world no matter what I do or how hard I fight to improve myself. Why does there have to be a hard limit on how far I can get? It feels as though I attempted a massive DIY project, and cocked it up so badly that my landlord had to hire in contractors to do it properly.

Only the thing I tried to build was ME. I am Frankenstein's monster, and I am left to the wayside while someone works to make something more beautiful. More perfect. More "right". Because that's what I am. Wrong. Faulty.

I suppose that's the trauma I have been struggling to put in words. To be a failure. I gave it my all. And attained only a step backwards. So go ahead, I guess. Strap a life-support system to my identity. Wire me up with synthetic add-ons and prosthesis until I'm a marionette with some redundant flesh strapped to the side. Maybe, with the right intervention, I can be made to imitate a real boy. But it won't be me doing it. How can it be? I'm just the broom that had all the important parts replaced. The persistence of singularity, however, would surely have been left behind.

But when my time comes I will swallow that pill, just as I swallow all the platitudes and the anemic accusations that lack any substance of thought or intelligence. I swallow my lot in life and wash it down with a wave of cold-burning rage. The unconducted potential energy of all the patterns I see but cannot arrange to make them visible to others. That jagged, maw-like rift which divides the ignorant from the ironic.

You know, a recent vlog I watched helped bring that into better focus for me, and I have reached a sort of epiphany on the matter. Maybe I do not have a motivational disorder? Maybe there's no such thing? I mean, think about it. Motivation, as in an urge to act, is an emotional component of feeling inspired or prepared. While it is true I often lack this more than others, I also FEEL motivated a lot of the time, but unable to act on it. In many ways that makes the frustration I feel at my mental paralysis even worse.

That same vlog suggested that what people tend to call motivation is actually discipline, and when they lack it, they are simply lacking the structure and directedness of a disciplined mind. Perhaps that means that what I have is a *discipline* disorder. However, as I addressed earlier... this, like motivation, is also not a perfect word to describe the issue, as people tend to think of discipline as something that can be developed and strengthened with time, yet for me all the structure or organization in the world doesn't squeeze a drop of that golden blood from the stone of my mind.

Discipline is like the trauma we subject our muscles to in order to get stronger. By forcing ourselves into a situation, we are forced to cope, to adjust to the battering of stress and grow stronger from resisting it. But all the enforcements in the world can't force my mind to co-operate with itself, and when I try, I find there are simply no bones upon which to grow these muscles. What I have to deal with is perhaps not a lack of motivation, but a lack of WILL. The two are often confused with each other. We speak of "strength of will", like it is something that can be directed like a beam. But no, THAT is motivation. Wanting something MORE, wanting it HARDER. Will is the spark that sits before that flame. Will is the CAPACITY to act.

So I can sit here, alight with the incalescence of a mind that is revving and straining to break free and act. Burning to death inside, but nothing on the outside. I can have a head-full of motivation... my blood soaked in gasoline... and no sparks. Will is what separates humans from animals. And... I am not even that. What does that make me? I sit still through life as if I am a mere witness, always fixed to the spot like rusted armour, watching from the outside. Nothing I want happens, and when I develop the strength to turn my stiff neck and set eyes upon what I want, I'm told that it's my fault I don't have it. My fault...

Will is paradoxical. It is because it is because it is. An ontological recursion of prime movers moving primes in endless fractal perfection that serves as the precursor to every action, every decision, every thought, and even desire. So elemental a thing that you can't even understand what it is I am actually talking about right now, can you? It is so foundational to your process of thinking that you can't even see it. And yet it is ALL I see, the shadow of its absence. The movement that never happened frozen in potential energy awaiting the primer that never comes. I see the silhouette of the engine I lack. I see little else.

To want to improve, one must be willing, sure, but first one must WILL. To even have the idea. To INSTIGATE the process. Before the point where I can even begin to get to the point where I can even have the option of being lazy - first there must be will. It's like... I have no voice in my soul. This thing that I am lacking. Something I never gave up, was never taken from me. This thing you take for granted. Treasure your will. Treasure knowing that when you want to act - you can. Your mind will not resist you. And in your voiceless cries for action, a weeping despair your only consolation. And if you ARE like me, then treasure the good days. The days when a friend's grace nudges you forward an inch or two. The days when you can almost feel your thoughts connecting, and you manage to type out a few paragraphs of that old blog entry. The days when your soul manages a whisper.

But all I can do is continue to farm motivation for myself, gathering all these little pearls of good feelings and fleeting moments of drive or inspiration, and to hoard coping methods and discipline-building strategies. I gather it all up and squirrel it away for the cold winter that is my existence. I will do the best to move with the inertia that life occasionally bumps my way. But this Founder came with batteries not included. All I can do is cling to the days when I find myself having picked up enough static charge from the differential against normalcy to focus the motivation I DO often have into a tiny bit of writing, or even just a few minutes of not wanting my wasted life to be given to someone better.

But I know, now. I am not demotivated. How can I be when what I burn with is the desire to be? Whatever else may be wrong with me. It is not, and never has been, in ANY sense, a choice. It isn't because I am just not trying hard enough, wanting things deeply enough, or not squeezing that stone with quite strong enough a grip. And I elect to choose, every day, to be different. I just wish it were my choice to make. I wish people would understand that it isn't. That I really CAN "try" and quite simply, nothing happens. And when they tell me it's my own fault, I wish I could muster the strength to ask them to point out where that fault lies, so I can try to fill it. But this paralysis prevents me even from doing that.

But I can't blame anyone else, not even for their callousness. I cannot ask or expect that anyone else understand. I can't even ask you not to tell me I'm wrong when I try to describe for you what it's like. I don't ask these things because I know that you can't possibly know what it's like. It's beyond your paradigm. This is why it is so important to NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS. Because nobody outside of my head can know how difficult it is to do even the things that look easy to everyone else. We all live in sheltered worlds, and they only ever bridge during those fleeting moments when we choose to listen to each other without assumption or prejudice. But you cannot be made to do this.

You don't know the indescribable frustration of feeling the breakers get flipped in your brain over and over again as you try to instigate a thought and your brain just won't let you complete it. The absolute non-compliance, with no external force to blame or lash out at. Like you're punishing yourself, trying to break yourself. You don't know what it feels like to have to summon the kind of mental will that grants a woman the strength to lift a car to save her child just to BEGIN to speak with any passion, because the volcanic energy you're riding is falling out of you and diffusing faster than you can maintain it, only to be told at the pinnacle of your rusted motion that all this does is serve as proof that you really do have it in you after all.

You don't know how it is to live your life in weakness, and then be persecuted for the first ember of strength that flickers inside you. To have your smallest victories used as ammunition against you, to undermine you. For people to try to make it seem like taking one step proves you can cross a desert, when the truth is that one step was already a desert for you. You still have the whole expanse to cross, and you can't opt out. Each step a longer and more arduous voyage, while those gifted with rocket ships by nature's lottery sail by with callous accusations of laziness.

You don't know, and so I can't hate you for your ignorance. This trivialization comes from a place of kindness. The manipulative scorekeeping of my failures and successes is not an act of malice, but a twisted form of encouragement from those who don't understand why the concept of tough love holds no virtue with one who is honestly, actually trying and not just being self-pitying. People can only judge by what they know, and so if you spare no rods in trying to squeeze an extra step out of me, I cannot hate you for that. In your world, it makes sense.

It's me I hate.

I hate the fact that I am this way.

I hate the fact that, because the way I am is an integral part of my identity, this means I hate myself.

I hate the fact that I feel guilty for hating myself because other people have way worse shit to deal with.

I hate the fact that I can't turn this off. Any of it. Not even these exact looping thoughts.

I hate the fact that these are facts. I can't change them.

I hate the fact that what I'm complaining about is ultimately me, and therefore I am to blame.

I hate the fact that it's still my fault.