The Importance of Being Plastic

Given my extended absence, coupled with the nature of my last post, you all probably thought I was dead, and in fairness, I thought I was too. Unless you are a cynic and a staunch believer that any blog other than your own was probably ghost-written, the appearance of this latest little essay should provide assurances as to the preservation of my own existence.

I have sobered up from that last experience, and whilst I won't bother going into the cliche of the importance of moving on, I will acknowledge its role. Nature is dynamic, and everything moves. She now has her own loving boyfriend to speak of, nice chap, an unassuming bloke and from the limited exposure I have had to him, is as much as she deserves. I wish both of them well. The human life is like a crazy road map. In this ever-shifting world of paradigms and progressions running parallel, perpendicular, and radiating in odd angles away and towards each other, it's important to keep moving and keep up. I don't at all mean this in a materialistic sense, though again I will grudgingly acknowledge its paramount importance. A friend [obvious privacy reasons here] will be undergoing cosmetic surgery in the winter holiday, a fine example of keeping, ahem, abreast of current trends. The average human being is two people, the one people think they are, and the one they really are. Making the two match is pretty much the entire key to existence as a human.

In a way it's all natural selection in another context, if you aren't who the rest of the world want you to be, you're in danger of being left behind and going extinct, a proverbial dinosaur in the Age of Mammals. Nature has indeed replicated itself in human thought progressions, as natural selection manifests itself in the dynamics of civilisation as trends rise and fall, people's mindsets and judgements change, and the world moves, not forward as most like to think, but in an infinitely indeterminate direction along an equally varied number of tracks. Ecologists term it phenotypic plasticity, the idea being that a creature's physique can be markedly varied even within a single species, all in the name of adapting to stresses and conditions in the natural system. The difference of course is a creature's motivation would be to stay alive, whilst in the compartmentalised, cloistered, post-1950s world we have set apart for ourselves, unless you're an extreme fuckcase, you're unlikely to die or kill just because you think differently.

The argument of course is the compromise conformity has on individuality. This is to me, however, a delusion cultivated by the minds of those people who evidently are insecure about who they are, and like to think they've built up and maintained a persona thoroughly different to that of all the other people on the planet. To be diplomatic, this is retarded. The only way a human being can be thoroughly distinct from another human being is if s/he isn't a human being at all. No matter how far removed a person's ideologies and thought patterns are from the mainstream, s/he is still only gleaning from the same and only trains of thought it's possible for a human to have, and no matter how 'alternative' they may seem, there's a whole group of people who will definitely obey these same rules and patterns. It is akin to an artist trying to paint a picture with the ambition of creating one utterly different to all the others, but no matter what he tries, he will always be reverting to the same palette of colours as everyone else always has, and that's something he can't and never will escape from.

This is why misanthropy is a partially misguided [though paradoxically, rather well-justified] concept. Misanthropy to me is not setting apart a lifestyle different to that of other humans; rather, it is hating an aspect of humanity sufficiently to choose an alternative path. In that sense, misanthropy defies nature, as no matter how utterly stupid the world seems around a person [and believe me I think the current world is plenty stupid] adamantly being stuck in a corner of the Mesozoic precludes a person from being truly adaptive. And I'll make it clear here, adaptivity isn't just about moving with current trends, it's about discarding the mindset that things do not have to change. Adaptivity is about moving on, tweaking one's mind and body as a compromise or counter to what the cards of circumstance deal. Emotional plasticity coupled with a preservation of the right values is the hallmark of those people who are truly successful, those who can move with the times, yet remember and stay true to what is truly the right ideal.