Wisdom

What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is also no doubt that even as we endlessly build and renew our characters and personalities over time that there is some strange and irredeemable property of human psychology that orients us towards building ourselves through a difference, differentiation and effective isolation that perhaps predisposes us towards negativity and the reflexive closure that this seeks to bring.

In the game of linguistic and cognitive information entropy that is Self, there are always more snakes than ladders and just as with matter, these systems always seek their lowest energy state. The trick is to identify the ways that positivity and goodness provides a step-up into an abstraction that is equivalent to a low-energy state but is simultaneously of significant logical depth and complexity. This is what differentiates living things from base matter itself but if truth be told, the spectrum of logical abstraction that appears to summit in sentience and intelligence is not a difference from inert matter in kinds so much as a difference in degrees of complexity. The underlying principle here is the same and seeking it in, through and as language is – perhaps – a concrete step towards a logical abstraction of emotional catharsis and personal emancipation.