Life is change; stasis is death. I say it again and again and again because people--perhaps myself most of all--need to hear it again and again and again. But how do we change? Or, more precisely and importantly, how do we choose to change? Because externally-induced change is omnipresent, unavoidable, and while not exactly irrelevant, at least not particularly useful as a measure of life success.

I ask this because the directive for change--real, personal, individual change--seems to exist in direct conflict with my other personal primary directive: honesty. I value honesty above all else; I think that without honesty, we cannot reach understanding (and thus faith, mercy, and the ideal/divinity that that trinity represents to me). Normally I come down unequivocally on the side of honesty in all questions of morality--I think "little white lies" are always harmful and malicious despite intentions because they represent an attempt to control another person, which no one has a right to do. But what about when you're trying to control yourself? To change yourself, you have to lie to yourself--you have to keep repeating a lie to yourself, over and over and over, until you believe it. I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to hurt people... We have to accept what we are, face our deepest, repressed desires and fuck-ups and reconcile with them in order to begin to fix ourselves, but what then? It seems like the only answer is this kind of fucked-up doublethink, lying to yourself and knowing that you're lying but doing it enough that eventually it's true because you believe it is.

An old page from one of my notebooks, circa September of last year.

For some reason I've been thinking about D'Anna again (partially I'm sure due to the recent release of The Golden Compass, the source material of which features an explicit parallel to Eve). And I think I'm able to better detail just what the difference between the three (original Eve, Battlestar's D'Anna, and His Dark Materials' Lyra) is, and why I prefer D'Anna's story. I'm not going to make a lot of sense here but I'll give it a shot.

Who does this guy Rawls think he is, Karl Marx?

An equal society can't work because an equal society would be based on cooperation rather than competition. That's what the economists tells us and they are our prophets (the prophets of profit, hoho), capitalism (or consumerism, really), our religion.

More, that's what the paradigm tells us. The narrative that drives our culture. Our entire societal being is based on the idea that cooperation and equality leads to stagnation, that progress and advancement only results from competition--more than that, only from competition for monetary and/or material reward. This is the essence of "Family": beneath all the rhetoric, what is most sacred is property.

In the beginning there was the Word.

Our world begins as language, thoughts, symbols, scraps of meaning communicated between the scattered identities that make up each individual. To live we organize them into coherent structures, forms, sequences, patterns. We call these structures stories or narratives, and from them we construct the meanings of our lives.

Everything is a story, a narrative arc from beginning to middle to end, inciting incident to rising action to climax to falling action to resolution. Everything, from the new blockbuster movie to the report on the evening news to our daily routines, is a story. That is to say, it is not reality that is made up of stories, but our interpretations of it. Our world is language, which become stories.