[Kogi] It seems to me we suffer from chronically underestimating... (W. T. on truth and action)

< It seems to me we suffer from chronically underestimating what is possible and what is real. We underestimate ecological complexity, we underestimate the density of living existences, even our own conscious life and potential – we underestimate what we could feel and discover, even though we already discovered it. Immensities of the partially forgotten.

As a rule, we underestimate – and this is not surprising. What is surprising is how often we forget the rule: things are more, lives are more, everything is actually more and will be different. Worlds under the radar, but also within, around, above and parallel to the radar. Oblivion is the rule, and the default is oblivious.

This does not go away when it comes to living, acting, and committing. This is most relevant when things become urgent, even though we are more oblivious than ever. Big words are used to designate "systems", "paradigms", "cultures", "problems", and of course, "solutions". It seems to me there is nothing easy to summarize, nothing easy to wrap up, no easy fix.

Yet I do not say this to dilute, give up, or silence struggles and moral stances. That's a risk, it's one effect we encouraged by thinking about it as a necessary corollary. Sure, saying this thing about complexity – at least, saying this like that – betrays my belonging to a group of leisure and privilege. After all, the favorite games (or lies) of my people are called Aesthetic Twist, Rewarding Guilt, How Clever Am I, Doing My Part.

On the contrary: this complexity makes the struggle more acute, more extreme and even more pressing. To consider that truth is utterly *unbalanced* and that things are asymmetrical to the point of emcompassing numerous symmetries, is to consider the savagery of truth, not its demise.

Struggles do not converge by necessity. Except when they do, sometimes, and where they could, where we threaded the potential convergence, and how it came to materialize for a time. Struggles do not converge because of universal "sides", that is to say, because they are simple and align by nature. They do because they're complicated enough, and because we multiplied models, rejected the grand, the verbose and the simplistic, because we sharpened sixty-three new notions and kept the best fifteen.

Many argue for silence: I argue for more voices, less simplified, less wrong, less bulky. To see clearly is to shut up about "that one thing" needed to see clearly, stop whining about the permanent lack of resolution, but also stop fetishizing the cacophony or the indeterminate. Enter the fray, listen more, ingest more, experiment more, and more generally: get to. work. more. >

– W. Thorzein, 'Some thoughts about all that', Meyersdale Diaries, 1988 (unpublished)