binary fictions vs. complex realities

why & how so many "logics" are poisoning us into monsters, a furiously incomplete discourse on furiously incomplete discourses

this will be a ramble. i like rambles. #deathjazz

this week we got the pereniall christo fascists wanting to overturn roe vs wade thing again, because their idea of heaven-on-earth is a handmaids tale. women as powerless breeders. in their worldview there are only two sexes and two genders, and only ever two kinds of people. people and non-people. these non-people are whoever they decide. Blacks, queers, Jews, women, transfolk, native people, suspected “terrorists”, crazy ppl, witches, crippled folk, sick folk, autistic folk, animals, plants, the Earth.

this kind of binary or “either-or” thinking is a fiction, a way that we can pretend to simplify and understand reality, the world. but really its a cop out, it’s ignorance-as-worldview. the fun thing about ignorance is that its a bit of a blank canvas, you can imagine anything as the truth, you can imagine whatever you desire as the only thing that matters for all beings. it is a decontextualized way of making decisions, an attempt to take relative situations and universalize them, via violence.

its colonization via forced indoctrination.

another case in point, the famous cis white guy relationship therapist terry real is doing one of those free virtual self help conferences. i love and hate to click through these free sign ups to see the sort of predictable horseshit shenanigans these straight mustardforkers get to get away with.

reliably, the presenters are majority white, maybe an equal mix of men and women, with a handful of brown and black people in there too. but to me, this is the kicker, they went ahead and put everyones pronouns under their bio picture (u think this is progess? im not at the punchline yet.)

every single one of these presenters is labeled as either a he/him or a she/her. thats it, those are the two flavors in all the world they could find as experts on relationships.

just, let that sink in for a minute. how “far” we have come. how “far” the straight white bougie mafia has brought us to these distant shores. the pinnacle, our manifest destiny of science, progress, enlightenment.

this bullhonky noah’s ark parody.

yet another side of the coin are the kind of universalist missionary types like jamie wheal. aka “sense makers”. these folks kind of admit to a diversity model (after all, the more kinds of people, the more products we can sell them), but only at the expense of every single oppressed minority that isn’t part of their burning man meets navy seals eugenics fantasia.

the newsletter i got from wheal today starts to try and unravel the linguistic problem of “pro life vs pro choice”, getting ever so close to pointing towards batesons luminous double bind concept, but veers off into straight white male hell realm territory before it can really get off the ground.

for those who dont yet know, double binds are linguistic traps that severely limit our cognitive behavioral options by steering the listener into making an either or choice, and sometimes far worse, making both choices so lose-lose that the listener goes into a kind of cognitive freeze response. this double bind technique is the mainstay of politicians, demogogues, cult leaders, serial abusers, and anyone who uses language to manipulate, control and dominate others. sometimes the cultural double binds are so pervasive that people, families, do it to themselves and each other by default, creating layers upon layers of high risk win-lose and lose-lose situations, all through language and worldview.

wheal uses the straight white male argument that terms like black lives matters sets up an oppositional defiance in the listener, creating an automatic response of white lives matter, thus causing more antagonism and divisiveness than a saying like all lives matter. keeping our anger in check for a moment, lets first break this apart because theres a few steps.

first, the idea of oppositionality itself is rooted in the dualistic worldview, the same one that posits there can be a people and non-people reality. the minute you entertain the cognitive escape route that allows you to deem certain “things” as things that do not deserve respect, youve sold your soul and your sense making along with it. so downstraem of that you get the seemingly sane but only because you cant see your insanity idea that saying black lives matter means that its a competition, and that the opposite of black is white, and that white lives must somehow not matter.

anyone who lives in actual reality knows that saying “i like carrots” does not mean “i hate peas”, because who thinks theres an opposite to carrots? but if you teach children that there are two kinds of foods, meat and vegetables… then you start to see how insidious this is. setting up a dichotomy wherin meat and vagetables are opposite kinds of food. where black people and white people are opposite kinds of people.

the trans activist and poet alok von madon (sp?) goes into this a lot deeper with the issue of the binary gender/sex paradigm. briefly, by culturally indoctrinating people that there are only two ways of loving that are morally just, you not only create harm and violence to those who are more obviously outside that limited set of choices, you harm everyone inside that set of choices too, because there is no room for the enormous variation in possibility, diversity, hybridity and complexity that can arise in each different situation, each different moment in time, each different position in space. you flatten and erase literal universes of cognitive, imaginal and behavioral optionality.

returning briefly to the straight white male christo centric indoctrination embedded in people like wheal, we can see the bypass they struggle with that leads them to a kind of universalist agape burning man delusion, because its the only way they can somehow deal with the layers of double binding in their nervous system.

indigenous wisdom, queer ecology and disability justice remind us that the only path toward universal or nondual love, is through deep recognition of the diverse and specific forms, bodies and ecologies that relationships actually exist in and as. the squirrels in these trees are not the same as the squirrels in those trees. in order to love and care for all the squirrels, we must observe, inquire and examine the specific differences in each habitat/ecology. these differences are not categorizable in spectrums of opposition or polarization. to categorize attributes in polarized ways, destroys the potentiality for mutual benefit.

what this means pragmatically is that as interpreters of information, we have to stop interpreting data, attributes, as oppositional. we have to stop believing in the idea of polarization. this means that the idea of masculinity and femininity is not a polar spectrum from “yang to yin”. in fact, believing so destroys the capacity to experience the energies we call yang and yin in a clear and lucid way. we just experience our delusion and say it is reality.

we must learn that our capacity to love and feel love, to care and receive care is not scarce. binary, either or double binds manipulate us into believing that all resources, all attributes are in competitive opposition, but that is not how ecologies flourish.

if i told u what u already knew, my apologies, i promise i will get to more innovative discourse as soon as i chew through enough of the backlog.

to note, i add and revise all my articles for at least a few days if not longer, being able to write publicly in this time-lapsed way is better for my particular kind of mind.

feel free to comment, ask questions, or even try and correct me. add to the ecology of the conversation. and please share with anyone who may find this helpful as i try and manage my virtual ecosystem and recreate the benfits of social media without the posionous aspects of platforms like facebook, twitter and instagram.

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