Polite Nothingness: On The Bystander Effect; alt title: Seeing Gods Bleed: On Testing Limits

And it will always be that grimy shit for me

• Tiona Deniece

Eyes closed trying to see shit
Writing to the beat switch

• Lord Juco

The nothingness in the title is the deep philosophical NOTHINGNESS that haunts beings that are as they muse over the are not.

Society doesn’t exist without our participation. Once we die, the society dies with us. What continues is a society without you with a unique/differing essence.

The essence is defined by the function of society. Since the function changes without you, the essence of society changes without you.

What does your participation bring to the table, so to speak, as to give everyone in society something to consume/be nourished with? How does your presence change the environment? How can you be part of a monument for good instead of a monument for evil?

These questions are too clean and tidy, however. They’re polite. Any answer to the questions needs to perform two tasks, the second of which struggles with relevance and edges on impoliteness: the real answer must answer the questions mentioned above but also answer to the practical circumstances that the questions must be answered in.

The most polite response is not always the right response. The impoliteness comes from the raw, independent nature of reality that takes a leading role in the consequences of our actions. This nature hosts our grandeur ideologies we aim to abide by.

We then address the questions again: What does my participation do to society so as create society? How does my presence create an environment for others to carry on similar decision making?

How can we be polite while expecting to maintain a status within society that demands respect?

A lot of the times, the winning move that seems the less trouble is not playing the game at all. Let society carry its own consequences like an asteroid field. And you fly along pleasantly, at times trying to survive running into asteroids, but mostly just hosting an awareness of your position relative to not running into asteroids.

Lazy writing. Something more constructive should be here.

And that’s fine and dandy. But we then have a duty to report to society what we saw. We can’t be bystanders if we just observe how society is shaped by colliding social forces forging an object to respond to. We can’t be witnesses to evil, do nothing, let the evil became a passive force with an everpresence in society without ourselves being evil. Not to act in such a case, to be polite is a violent nonpolite response. The polite thing would be to wage war.

How is the war waged? By allowing society to react to the evil and to react to the evil as a society.

If the society cannot react the same, it’s a broken society full of contradictions.

The contradictions are permitted because the consistency that support it.

For example, water becomes rain. Rain falls on a forest fire. The fire fails to be extinguished. We further look into the scene and justify it. Although it seems like a contradiction, “underneath” there’s a consistency.

If we do not look further into the fire, we are LIABLE TO MAKE UP SUPERSTITIOUS REASONS for matters that need not be superstitious.

Not that the superstitious doesn’t have a place in our mind but only once it’s been investigating so as create a stable, “objectified” platform for society to express itself; society being the individual.

According to Peirce, synechism flatly denies Parmenides’ claim that “Being is, and non-being is nothing” and declares instead that “being is a matter of more or less, so as to merge insensibly into nothing.” Peirce argued that the view that “no experiential question can be answered with absolute certainty” (fallibilism) implies the view that “the object has an imperfect and qualified existence” and implies, furthermore, the view that there is no absolute distinction between a phenomenon and its substrate, and among various persons, and between waking and sleeping; one who takes on a role in creation’s drama identifies to that extent with creation’s author.

• On the extended mind and sidestepping citing “Australians”