But are we REALLY honouring them?
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But how many times have you walked past a statue or a building, et cetera, and wondered who in the world is fill in the blank? Right. And at the very least, these things have perpetuated that the name was kept alive. But we often don't know who they were or what they valued or thought was important, let alone why society valued them at the time, or that we should value them now
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 2:11
But it makes me wonder, what is it that we're now constituted of as a country in terms of how we account for our collective history? I think it could be argued that it may just be healthier to tell the truth about how it is. We are versus what we aspire to be. It's kind of like we have a Disney fication of our mythology, and that can't be good with all of the statue and placards. And I agree with you. It's something
And putting Maya Angelou on a Quarter is certainly not going to do that. And so what's going to happen is something else in the next couple of months will come out. And that'll be the new hey, we've hit this level of progress. Look at us. We put a mural of, I don't know, Desmond Tutu on the side of a market in Washington, DC. Look at us. And that does nothing. It does nothing anyways
And does it really have to be as long to eradicate that way of believing that delusional thinking? I don't know. I'm sort of all over here, but I really appreciate what you said. Thank you
But the conversation of representation, I think, is a relatively newer one. I think of it as the growing pains of the organism that is society right in the past. The lack of representation. I don't like that. The lack seems more passive. I would say it was much more of an aggressive shutting out, but the growing pains of understanding that we have to dissolve and eradicate the aspirational delusions of who we are as Americans
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:49
It seems that American mythology is at least how it operates in the minds of my fellow citizens as a real concrete thing. And once you kind of start tinkering with that, people have a hard time with it. I think it may be necessary for a healthy society to occasionally, maybe every generation, every other generation to sit down and then to reevaluate if it wants to hold on to certain values and then to reconstruct itself
I just don't know where they have long term plans when I'm talking like 50 or 100 years, because in that case, because they're doing that long term thinking, they're going to pause and reflect on. Is this what I value? Is this what I find important? Not I, but is this what we as a culture or country, society, et cetera. Is this where we want to go anyway? I love these thoughts. Also really powerful
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:55
And if I were to take that principle of me being a product of also my oldest surviving ancestor, I would have to say that if Ronald Reagan was alive when Harriet Tubman was also alive, and if he's also the product of, let's say, grandparent as well, it's highly likely that the social repertoire that was informed by his grandparents who were alive during slavery also impacted him
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:58
If you don't abide by the rules in terms of the individual, I think that's also somewhat of either an incomplete idea or a fictional one, because the individual, the thing that we call an individual is somewhat of a fiction, because if you're an individual. Really, no one would understand what you are saying. But since we share a language, we share a common experience out of a collective group
I don't know how long ago and what it was I was reading, but it said something along the lines of like, humans have created certain fictions that we've bought into in order to operate. And I can't remember the specifics, but it had something to do with money or legal aspects. Maybe it's ownership of land. I can't remember. It could have been a number of things, but because of that, I've thought that humanity humans create fictions to operate in some way
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:57
You asked me about what in my mind kind of translated as the synthesis between eye identity and little eye identity. I think you were kind of talking about one versus the other or one creating the other vice versa. And what I believe about that. And the best way that I can answer this is by saying, I don't know what I believe about that, but I know how to use that language and to put it in the right spot when I'm using that language
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:48
But a lot of people like to stop at the 63 because I have a dream speech is a great historical, beautiful speech. But his ideas ultimately did not prevail. Other people's ideas ultimately prevailed. But in this book, it's a very heady book. So let me read you. Two parts of this first part is the heady part, and the second part is kind of more common parlance
I really like your thoughts on big eye and little eye identity being maybe a chemical process as opposed to additive. I want to think on that a bit more. Also, thank you so much for recommending many this book. I'm excited and intrigued by it because it's been pondering hierarchies for a while now and that they're extremely frustrating and some are overt and some are more nuanced and subtle. Right. Okay
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:55
So I think you can universalize that principle among human beings. But then we have a logic that says, well, if murder is worse than assault, then therefore the higher penalty will be on murder. And there is a logic there. But because the thing is, the logic doesn't mean it is reasonable enough to solve your problems
And so I think that when your nose is up against the glass and you're so zoomed in and you're only looking at things like what we don't want with respect to, like murder or sexual assault or domestic violence, et cetera, it's not a long term plan of what we do want. What type of people do we want to be? What do we value, what is important, what kind of society do we envision as a desire, like something ahead that we're aiming for?
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 1:53
They call them the century of humiliation or when Matthew C. Perry took a naval fleet to Japan and we called it the opening of Japan. This is very soft words. Japan doesn't call it the opening. They call it the end. So I guess the question is what happens when you discover that these artifacts do not take on principles of the values in society? What happens after that internally with a person? And does that's that lead to some kind of action
But then we realized either there's something we didn't know about that person or our views have changed. And now what's at the bottom of those bandaids is a wound that needs to be rooted out, scoured out. And yet it's not because we've built everything else on top of it. And so that wound begins to fester and infection spreads, the pain spreads. And I think that that affects not only individuals, society as well. There's nothing good that can come from it
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 0:41
You know, I'm actually just reminded about a series on Netflix called Explained. And there is this one episode on Pirates. And watching watching that episode kind of did the Harry Potter staircase thing for me just by watching that, by providing me a different historical context about possibly Pirates and why we have the mythology that we do about Pirates. It's a very interesting episode
Wow. I will never see Pirates the same way again. Talk about shifting of the staircases. Wow. I think it was really disturbing to you how seemingly simple it shifted from the reality to the romanticized ideas of Pirates and that they're still these romanticized versions are separate almost in their existence and what they are to what we know of as Pirates today, even. And like all of it is baffling that we buy into these fictions the way that we do and run with them
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 0:20
If you think that is something, just wait till you find out that Hawaii is still legally, technically its own sovereign Kingdom and not the United States. States
Charlie Floyd
@damonnomad · 4:52
And after they've kind of determined if it's going to negatively impact them or not? They decide if they're going to accept it or not. Why can't we do that in supposedly the most advanced government that has ever existed
And I've known this and I've said this many times in other conversations to other people of like, I don't believe there is such a capital T truth. We move closer to it, but we never actually take hold of it. And I think this conversation has been a very, I guess, vivid reminder of that. And don't get me wrong, although I'm reflecting and thinking in a sort of gloomy fashion, I've really enjoyed and appreciate the conversations
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