two things I want to talk about today:

The crystallization of experience and opportunity

and

how to properly combat political opposition.

first things first: the crystallization of experience. what the fuck does this mean? there’s a variety of ways to describe this. maybe you’re leaving room for people to keep lying to themselves; in some context, it’s about retaining plausible deniability; sometimes you don’t want to speak things into existence; other times you simply don’t want to scare the hoes with lovebombing. these are all things that fundamentally revolve around this concept of experience crystallization.

things exist in the world as probabilities. everything is only probable, until it actually happens. but until then, it is only probable. when you use the power of language to articulate something, you give it power. if you keep lying to yourself about something without explicit acknowledgement and articulation, is it ever true? if you redact some facts, you leave yourself an exit strategy. words give ideas power, so, want not speak not. as for the lovebombing, it’s no different. speaking on the existence of feelings too soon stops the flirtatious dance short of completion.

all this to say, when you allocate attention to something, you when you articulate and frame and describe and measure its existence, you crystalize its phenomenological structure. a cardinal is a cardinal only once you say it is. before that, it’s just a bird, and before that, it’s just an animal. I’m assuming you can see here both the power of language and the problem with it. by giving things descriptions, we make them real, so they can be studied and understood; but in doing so, we also give them Form, and Form is not so easily changed. you can create different versions and change the outward appearance, but changing the phenomenological Form is a different challenge entirely. you see this everyday with conversations and quips about “ a man is a woman, a woman is a man, what does a word even mean anymore??”. high-level abstractions are particularly difficult. Justice, Honor, Goodliness, Love, Hate, Horror, Art, Fear, Loathing; these are all Forms but take many appearances depending on the observer’s looking glass. speaking on them helps to understand them, but like too many botches brush strokes can ruin a painting, too many botched articulations can ruin a Form.

Second things second, we live in a time with increasingly open and obvious political instability. In such times, it’s common to hear things like “if we just got rid of [group of people] everything would be fine” or maybe you hear things about armed combat so one culture can rid itself of a pesky neighboring culture. whatever these sentiments may be, above all else they are one thing: retarded. opposition elimination via bloodshed is a bad form of political strategy.

ok, so what do you do instead? because surely you have an agenda to push, surely you see the world as having a Natural Order and a way that it should operate. how do you deal with the people blocking your path?

part one is the classic strip-them-of-all-sociopolitical-influential-power. once you do this, it doesn’t really matter what they say, because they have no influence on the discourse. their words fall flat because you’ve removed any symbolic substance. there’s a variety of ways to do this, but my personal go-to is to co-opt the cultural syntax of the opposition and use it against them. if slurs are used a form of oppression, start using the same slurs against people using slurs, but in a better way; beat them at their own game.

part two is to socially silo your opposition so you can keep an eye on them. you want to use them as a heat sink for political rallying. a black hole of political attention.

in doing these things, you’re reducing what would be radical political opposition to a glorified hissy fit. their words have no power, so they cannot galvanize masses; they cannot gain a strategic upper hand because you see their every more. fundamentally speaking, you’re taking away their source of attention, and if you don’t have any attention, you can’t have any phenomenological crystallization.

this all probably sounds pretty horrific, because it often is. but this is the playbook, and it can be adjusted for different social scales. something to think about, I guess.

anyway, this line of thinking — what we think to be “human consciousness” and “attention spans” are fundamentally two parts of the same thing — has been a major theme of my ponderings lately. A simple analogy might sound something like “Consciousness is a stage, and Attention is the spotlight”; not perfect, but good enough. When we allocate attention to something, and we start to articulate that thing’s nature, we crystalize the nature. the more attention, the more articulation, the more crystallization, and the harder it becomes to make any changes should we start to hate what we see.