The future and past

Debate involves the mind-god-trick of self evident goals. Debate operates under a myth involving the effects of personal reward and direct investment with an end we can see. The operation of the ballot is mechanical and absolute: win or loss, with minor gradations of speaker points. The incentive, because of the clarity, (moral – win good, loss bad; normative – what should be done inscribed with similar starkness) produces its own peculiar motivations for action, and means for thinking of the world. More than anything, recently, debate has struck me as egocentric, obscuring the ends for which it operates. The question becomes for me, whether the habituated structure of engagement of debating for a ballot overflows its original container, and spills into other forms of political engagement, whereby the expectation and structure of change must be as clear for me to be motivated to act. The normative function seems relevant too: if an argument appears to be true, is supported by a weight of evidence, someone ‘wins’ (in their ability to convince or effectuate change), how do these things determine how I act? Does debate structure my relationship to the world in an axiomatic sense? That is the loss I face: the loss of self-evident goals and means.

Thus I willed it: I also face options on how to perceive/define the past. Should I view my past investments with debate as less-valuable for the fact that they did not produce an end I feel satisfied with? What value/feeling should I feel towards them, for the appearance of futility now?

The past is the mirror image of the challenge I feel to treat the present with the worth and weight of a lived life, rather than a means to an end.

Duncan

In Tehran [Diane Sawyer] even mingled with an anti-American mob to get a feel for the Persian street. “Do you not like me?” she asked an Iranian chanting “Death to America” slogans. (He said it wasn’t personal.)
NYTimes

This, to me, says a lot.

me, today

Some days I feel like I’ve found purpose, other day I wouldn’t even know where to look. Most of the time I search without any map, and that’s where I find myself now. All these days just end up accumulating behind me as yester-days, which seems to be the only thing I have in real abundance. Things gone by. Not achievements, not even really sorrow, just accumulated chits of desire and thought: deposit slips to a bank from which I won’t receive any return. I decided that was the only way I could describe my life: the accumulation and re-distribution of desire in particular forms. The fact that I wake up and move makes me a social machine. I take the desire to live, to exist, to achieve whatever I achieve, then transform it into forms acceptable to systems of power. It takes time: the hours I spend doing school work, working on debate, putting off desire. It takes molding: the output has to be formatted (paper writing), blocked (debate), shrink-wrapped (sex?), socially acceptable (all things). The organization and production of desire occurs through the use of discourse, of power, which creates the awful regularity and repetition that surrounds me. I can’t find any reason to value any one form of desire over the other, I only know the degree of social sanctions attached to each transgression, each nickel into the wrong slot, each moment out of turn. That there represents the nihilism of my life. The constant fear of the future, which I imagine could transform itself into something unspeakable (I greatly fear the inability to articulate and describe whatever malaise), or something irrevocable. Of course, to some degree I’m already living the irrevocable, it’s not like I’ll get back these moments that I throw to the memory hole, but I am paralyzed by the greater fear of a future hiding around the corner, and so I just keep walking down the self-same hall. I pretend to be taking myself nowhere because of the fear of being somewhere.

I know what it takes to leave this. I know as much as I can. But

Duncan