Entry 19 - Perfectionism and the Rise of Academic Bullshit Brains

So divided! Humanity seems like a jumble of parts randomly stuck together with out characters made like a patchwork quilt of recycled molecules and thoughts—pieces gleaned from the scrap of Hitler, Washington, Rodin, and every other person ever to exist. Perhaps we are like telepaths with no way to drown out the voices of everyone else. Just a big jumble of voices that overwhelms our own until we don’t know who is speaking and who is listening. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to quiet down, to work as a cohesive unit. Body, mind, spirit. It’s almost like our minds wait for an excuse to launch into a projection of the future, a daydream, a worry. Anything but to be quiet and still. If this randomness were reflected in a physical sense, we would probably be incapable of walking, we’d just fall down twitching. I realize as I’m writing this that my heart palpitations have stopped and I’m not so angry. We are all so locked inside ourselves. For being such social creatures, this isolation surprises me. One wouldn’t thought we’d be in each other’s heads so much, we couldn’t wait to revel in the aloneness. The only time I’ve never been able to learn something has been when my mind has refused to accept that that’s the way it is. It’s an actual physical sense of rejection. Maybe that’s why little kids can learn so much better than the rest of us. These thoughts I write down are repetitions of clichés. They are hardly original. But there is a distinct difference between hearing and understanding. Humans have to continuously reinvent the wheel to understand their true nature. It’s fine to hear ideology and attempt to implement it, but it stays cold and academic that way. When you understand it, really understand it, at a core level, it’s different. It changes every decision and every action in your life. H said that a West Point cadet must excel at everything. That there is no room for anything less than perfection. You can still make mistakes, but they must be learning mistakes, never again repeated.

Well, fuck me.