Brain Bend

You better not laugh, you better not cry, repress those emotions, I can’t tell you why, I’m not passionate enough.

Humans have a tendency to mythologize people/events/narratives which really scares and interests me. To pick and example out of absolute thin fucking god knows; Benjamin Franklin. Here’s a man who’s known to the world by the wisdom snips and occasional invention he left behind, a founding father. There’s a loaded expression for you all, cherub monkeys. So (ignore our mostly shared Australianism for a moment, those readers who actually do live in the land of the *cough* free, I’m probably way off the mark, skim over please.) we have this group of largely repulsively ugly men, in various states of slave ownership, drug and alcohol abuse, womanizing and building the greatest damn democracy the world has ever seen, and they are known by nothing but what we place upon them. Nobody cares about who the founding fathers were as people, and if they do, it’s relational, nobody cares about historical figures except in the context of their actions, we build images, meanings, everything around something often massively unintentional.
All this is fairly obvious and well documented. It’s hardly new thought.

Ok so where am I going with this? Are you utterly lost? Well, what we’re learning in university right now, (WARNING – innocent first year shit coming up, tune out now if easily superior or uncaring for wankery) is that we receive the world effectively “mediated,” woo buzz, and that we cannot perceive reality but through the visual, lingual, kinesic etc languages we use. So we cannot directly interact with reality.
NOW, let’s use the example of a “mountain.” We understand the land form we term mountain through the cultural connotation, lingual connotations around that. So words like mountain, land form, etc, everything is loaded, everything is stopping us from processing it as pure, we see it and compute it through systems of language.
For the purpose of my rant here let’s call the ‘pure reality’ MOUNTAIN and what we see and understand and imagine and connote as OUR MOUNTAIN.
Ok, hitting the meat now. I learnt about this concept because somebody used language codes to explain it to me. So I processed the ‘reality’ of my processing capabilities, mediated through YET MORE LANGUAGE AND SYMBOL. Now, here’s where I know I’ll lose the last clingers of you, this means that language systems, and the concept of not accessing reality, is a reality which is mediated to me via meaning systems.
Which, if anyone in my course followed, leads to the logical conclusion that we DO access reality directly, because language systems are a reality. Scary.

Ben Franklin though? What the hell? I lost you there. Well, Ben Franklin the man was a reality, he was a living person, like you and you assume I am, but we know ‘him’ through what we have been told, what we see in the few photos, what we build as a mythology around him. So many people, as I said, make the distinction between the Ben Franklin construction and the real Ben Franklin. But what if by being such a contruction, what if through language mediation, THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS WAS EQUALLY AS VALID, EQUALLY AS REAL AS THE SUPPOSED REALITY ITSELF.
Theoretically nothing prevent this.

And I’ll leave you on that. Sorry if you feel like I’m wasting 1’s and 0’s here. You can just read the other posts. There’ll be something hidden in my archives for you.