I wrote a previous piece about how it seems like "normie" American society, and I suspect the entire mainstream culture of "the West", has forgotten how to believe in abstractions. Politicians and pundits repeatedly pontificate about great and powerful abstractions—God, Jesus, liberty, justice, rights, truth itself—and yet none of them behave as though they actually believe in those abstractions. Elon Musk and his minions bray about "free speech" constantly, right in the middle of demanding ruthless punishment of dissent; clearly "free speech" means little to them beyond a personal license to misbehave. But such nakedly contradictory behavior is scarcely limited to Musk's Internet fandom. Doublethink pervades American political discourse at every level.

When I was a child, first learning about the very concept of tyranny and reading George Orwell's 1984 for the first time, I had a very difficult time understanding that "doublethink" isn't like conscious deception. "Why would anyone contradict themselves deliberately?" asked my childish mind, but now I can see that it's no longer deliberate. It might have started that way, with conscious decisions to start warping one's own political language in order to impress someone powerful or fit into a coveted social elite, but now it's woven into the texture of mainstream discourse and thought. Respectable professional persons have learned to function in an environment where absolutely no concept has any definite meaning, where literally everything is (selectively, as circumstances dictate) questionable or potentially unreal.

I'm still struggling in this environment. I am NOT used to it even after years of immersion in it. As I've said before, I treasure my abstractions and worked painstakingly to define the limits of my own knowledge and distinguish which concepts I have decided to accept on faith. I only converted to Catholicism because I realized that there were at least a few key Christian and Catholic concepts that I was willing to accept on faith, and now they remain in our intellect as solid and even comforting abstractions: the Incarnation, sin and "original sin", repentance, even transubstantiation (which I daresay many Catholics privately reject.) There are many other concepts which we accept on a similar basis, as immovable pillars which anchor our logic, such as liberty and objectivity and empiricism. We feel that it's our duty to maintain these abstractions with continuing study; we are always seeking to add more, and there's always the chance of ejecting one from the museum so to speak. From these solid anchoring points, these postulates we've accepted as eternal truths, we attempt to formulate our best rational thoughts.

It's taken me a long weary time, a lengthy span full of naïve assumptions about how other human beings think, to realize that one can live without any such abstractions at all. One can live one's life without believing in any solid truths. I tend to think in terms of "things that are true" vs. "things that may be true", realizing that absolutely nothing can be completely ruled out even if their probabilities are vanishingly small. But there's another way of thinking, thinking in terms of "things that may be true" vs. "things that are definitely false or forbidden". In my world, nothing is entirely forbidden (which reminds me of the "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" credo dubiously attributed to my friend Serenity's one-time leader, Hasan-i Sabbah) but in this alternate worldview, there's a long catalogue of forbidden concepts which are variously claimed to be nonexistent, blasphemous, insane, and other pejorative things. These forbidden things are like paradoxical anchor points: you know you're in good shape as long as you're moving away from them.

And what about the things that may be true, to a person who's used to this bizarre (to me) mode of thinking? From what I've seen, people who think like this maintain a kind of ever-shifting constellation of half-believed principles which they employ as justifications for never anchoring their logic to anything solid. Some of those semi-principles are likely to be justifications for embracing a shadowy and chaotic model of the world. A dash of selective nihilism helps, for example—when in doubt, claim that nothing matters anyway, even if you don't really believe that. It might be true, that's all that matters in the moment. "In the moment" is practically how one is forced to live in such a world. Let's say you're married, for example, but you can never quite believe that your spouse actually loves you, because you're not even sure that "love" is real. The best you can do is constantly reassure yourself of your spouse's loyalty from moment to moment, testing them.

The nearest thing to solid and permanent anchoring-points for thought, in this twilight realm, are powerful persons and institutions. You can't quite believe in God but you can believe in the Catholic Church, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon. You can't quite believe in your own spouse but you can believe in Elon Musk, the world's richest person and therefore quite clearly the world's greatest genius, because it takes genius to make money—all the self-help books say so, so it must be true. Solid objects must seem like the most trustworthy things of all: statues, monuments, graven images, famous documents. "Truth" lives in these things surely, and maybe even "God".

~Chara of Pnictogen

Has anyone done a manga where we learn that the most important job of the Emperor Naruhito (or any previous emperor of Japan) is heading up a secret magical task force or team of vampire-hunters or something of that sort? Maybe I'm just rehashing Shinkenger here. ~Chara

A great many important members of the Pnictogen Wing are killers in some way or another, and some are guilty of terrifying crimes in their pasts.

cw: talking about the criminals and murderers of the Pnictogen Wing

I feel like I could tell a lot of stories about my life but that they'd all be just a bit south of really interesting, if that makes any sense. I feel as though I've managed to see a lot of different things but in a sort of...incidental way. I have never felt central to anything in my life, that I can recall, until I realized that I'd somehow managed to become the center of a household.

I once saw Stephen Hawking for example! from a moderate distance, in 1993 perhaps. He was maybe fifty yards ahead of me, rolling past on the central walkway through the campus of the California Institute of Technology, probably on his way to a symposium at the Caltech Athenaeum. (I don't think I ever got to peep inside there myself.) I watched him go by and...that's basically it, that's my Stephen Hawking story. I'm sure that a lot of ex-Caltech students can tell similar stories of seeing someone famous for a few moments, from a distance, maybe in a lecture hall. Once, and then never again.

I am curiously at peace with this marginal sort of life. I remember once being convinced (mostly, I think, because I sense my RL parents were pushing heavy expectations onto their children) that I would become someone really great, like all the heroes of science and art and culture that I was reading about in childhood. At one time I imagined being a composer like Mendelssohn or Schumann, or a marine biologist (that's a rather common wish I think), or a great experimental chemist like Curie or Pasteur. As it turns out, I'm not great at anything, except being permanently irritating and refusing to go away and be quiet.

Spent too much of my life being told to shut up. Do I need to shut up now? Is it time for me, once and for all, to stop talking?

I've never been any good at knowing when to stop.

~Chara of Pnictogen