rational models applied to irrational beings rewrite ver.
(4 months rewrite edition)
Occasionally I view myself as if I were the observer, being in third person.The psychological detachment coming from this kind of objective viewpoint is, in a way, easier to endure than personally experiencing every needle, although this raises quite the paradoxical view. As a coping mechanism, you could analyze, you could pick out every last fucking thorn. You could ask CER-prompt questions such as, “How does the side character’s recent troubles affect the course of the narrative?”, even back it up with evidence. “She wants to kill herself.” oh no. But it isn’t you…. You’re able to look deeper into “her” emotional chasm.
Sometimes, masquerading as the observer is the only way to survive the hell of being the subject.
One person and another. Isn’t it strange how music, art, elegance, the sublime… can be simultaneously beauty of breathtaking awe and the most utterly despicable grime? Or perhaps not. Perhaps the very concept of subjectiveness, judgement based on the human emotion, was forever forced to intertwine with our understanding of art. Between every human interaction, it is persistently, stubbornly, present within our common differs of opinions. The selfish dispute between business partners, who though they both act purely rationally, end up ultimately giving rise to their own downfalls.
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a famous example in game theory, this exact scenario is precisely recreated. Where each agent connected to the issue demonstrates instrumental rationality, they begin to write their own demise. Two rats in a jail, waltzing on the game board, acting in their own “best interest” while shooting themselves in the head, writing the myth of their very own downfall.
Humans lack objectivity. And this becomes unsettlingly evident in said situations. We can’t quantify our sorrow, our bleeding imperfections. We can’t mathematically compute the chokehold of trauma, guilt, desire, and desperation within the heart and roots of our lives. Seeing me through her, maybe it’s just one of the ways we as criminally subjective humans attempt to seal up our wounds. Resilience, or survival? No, rather it is just our idiosyncratic chaos forcing objective systems on them to make a cold, hard sense of what we feel and observe.
I don't have to go through what she's feeling. The empathy I feel for those who are struggling is also accompanied by guilt and relief. Relief that it's not me. Because they're not me. Her pains? they're not mine. Although I can empathize, I can't sympathize. She's beautiful, but that's subjective - my beauty could very well be the raw ugliness you turned away from so disgustingly.
We crave beauty and desire perfection. If I viewed you through a distorted lens, would you still be beautiful? No, you would be unrecognizable. Like a wilted flower, you would no longer be "beautiful" - the ugly reality behind your mirage.
So what happens when the lens becomes cracked? By betrayal, sorrow, grief, or even the passing of time? Is beauty real if it can vanish like that? The fact that we know our lenses are cracked, and we still look anyway. That we chase beauty, even knowing it’s fragile, maybe even knowing that we'll never reach it. That we try to find truth in a distorted mirror. What's the point? In the end, the tantalizing illusion of beauty we can only meet within our dreams, the warped reflection, it's fake anyways.
The silence is louder than any scream, and in that silence, even the illusion of beauty vanishes.