World Breaking

Another hungover weekstart, or rather the peculiar variant of a hangover one acquires from drinking heavily the day before and then stopping for a period before going to bed, which is like being hollow inside. The Bank Holiday proved, well, interesting. The teeming hordes of people in Whitley Bay at lunchtime yesterday will, I suspect, stay with me for some time. It was remarkably like a festival: 'Look everybody, we've gone out during the day!'. And why? Because everyone else does. On Friday Lynne told me something remarkably relevant to the Puzzle. I had noticed that almost every single hen party one encounters in the Toon involves women wearing devil horns, with the exception of the bride-to-be. I asked her, as the nearest available girl, why this was. The question seemed to puzzle her, as if I was asking why the sky was blue or why alcohol was nice. Eventually she came back with, "It's just what ye do." This is a wonderful example of an important feature of Purpose, which allows me to discuss its contradictory features. One looks to others to find out how to behave, or rather what one's purpose is. Ostensibly this means there has to be a first actor, who defines the method of behaviour. While this is to a certain extent given by the other impeti, it requires someone for whom Power can overrule Purpose to the point where they can define a path. The fascinating part of this is that once this is defined with sufficient conviction, with sufficient authority, others will follow because it has become their way of behaving.
This is very dangerous, for two reasons. The first is that conviction can be faked. One can profess to believe something and define it as the way to act without necessarily holding it to be true. The root of the word 'con' is, after all, 'confidence trickster'. The second is that the leader can be wrong. Given the variance of belief throughout the world, there will be no-one who claims that every single definer of values is right all the time. This is why we must be wary of going down the Nietzschean path of assigning value to the act of defining values itself; by itself, it has no merit. It is only in combination with the truth that moral leadership can have value.
To facilitate my locating the purpose buried in the reflexive awareness, it may help to give a list of the various purposes currently active in society.

(a) Act like everyone else, although this includes asserting one's individuality - but not to the extent that it rocks the societal boat too much. The easiest demonstrator of this is clothes: contemporary fashion encourages everyone to look different while looking the same. This even applies to the stereotype of difference, Goths, as they have certain patterns of dress which they define by each other in opposition to mainstream society. Ironically, in defining themselves by this opposition, they are subsumed within the ordinary.

(b) Be opposed to anyone operating outside of this broad consensus - this includes ideologues as well as the religious. Narrow ideologies threaten the purpose of the mainstream by presenting an alternate purpose. We aim to satisfy Purpose only once, and upon acquiring that satisfaction initially it requires a great deal to change it.

Given what I discussed above, in investigating the problem of Purpose, I must find something that does three things: Firstly, seems to be derived from an appropriately authoritative source, secondly, is derived from a source that is sufficiently similar to oneself, and thirdly, is lodged within a context of enough strength to break the current societal paradigm. My current focus is the reflexive awareness. This promises to be fun.

The First Post. Why?

I've decided to create a weblog that I'm not going to tell anyone about. Why? I don't know. It's purpose is to allow me to record my progress in puzzling out the final section of the Impeti theory, alongside my more conventional life. As such, it's not really intended to be read. So why? Well, alongside every other blogger, I too suffer from the need to show myself to the world, in the faint unmentioned hope that something will result. The difference, at least the way in which I'm justifying it to myself, is that I hope to find out why.