I’ve never had a desire to own a microwave, and I prefer not to use one even if it belongs to someone else.
(Sometimes I do. Like in a motel. See also ‘subscribing to HBO’. See also ‘why I don’t want to motel anymore’.)
By torturing a turn of phrase, I could say: I don’t believe in microwaves …
But that would be kinda dumb, because this isn’t about “I”, or about belief at all.
I just … Know.
It’s the same regarding my preferences with regard to analytical idealism over materialist notions of reality.
And the same with anarcho-primitivism over, let’s say, ‘trans-humanism’.
The thing is … I don’t need to fight. To prove I’m ‘right’.
If you want to think idealism is airy-fairy, or that anarchy is useless and dumb … do it.
It’s not any skin off my nominally white ass.
You wanna know what’s harder though?
The part where I try to convince myself “I’m” right, that I-I-I Have … the Truth.
Looky here, V., I say silently.
The Truth, even if somehow manages to be knowable, is … not … all that relevant.
It’s good to know little truth tricks like how to change my own oil, or whether “college” and career is what to do with one’s life, or that President Don is self-evidently a malignant narcissist … sure, okay. It’s all well and good to consider the lyrics to “My” Way and whether they’re true, or even resonant, or whatever. (Or Lead! Or Follow! Or get th’hell outta the way of the march of progress, ya dirty unemployed homeless fuckin’ hippie!)
But at the level of what reality is real(ly), or what C/consciousness is, or whether meditation is worth all this time, attention, fuss …
Truth is like a microwave.
A distracting tangent of a tool, and a slightly … squicky one besides.
I’d just … prefer not to use it.
And this “I” Know.
I continuously protect this floodwall of Knowing against the relentless erosive force of what the great mass of the Civilized insist they think they know, ferrrr-surrrre.
And then I look myself in the eye and say, plaintively even …
“Oh God, floodwall protection engineering, I wish I could quit you”
Amen.
We are made in the image of God.
God is not … a Person.
Yet we persist in imagining that we are the people.