Crash Theory

Every day, I feel myself less and less.

Probably the best movie made in recent years, Crash, opens with the lines, “It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In LA, nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” I think that there’s one thing missing from this though. The reason we crash into people is not to feel just “something;” it’s to feel ourselves.

Our entire world, our social structures, our religions, our schools, everything around us, is designed to perceive the other. We wear glasses to see the world around us better. My grandfather wears a hearing aid to hear the world around him. Every day, we invent new ways to better perceive the world around us. We’re constantly creating sharper images on TVs, and creating crisper speakers to go with them. In fact, the entire discipline of science is based on the idea of helping us to better understand our surroundings. Quantify phenomena to make them easier to understand. Diagram processes so they can be better comprehended. We, as a culture, are obsessed with increasing our awareness of the world around us.

Why do we do this? Because our society is based around Hegelian dialectics. Now, I didn’t say that just to drop a fancy, polysyllabic term, and to make my parents feel better about dropping 100K on my education. I also used it because it’s true, through and through. A dialectic is basically the idea of identification by comparison. In other words, when I see someone who is black, I think, I’m white.” When I see a jock, I think, “I’m not a jock.” When I see a woman, I think, “I’m a man.” And on and on. By forming enough relationships, a rough shape begins to emerge. Sometimes, I’m not good at conveying my thoughts in words, so this picture kind of sums up how I view a dialectic relationship:



As more and more relationships are created, a shape in the middle begins to appear. In fact, you can almost “see” the shape. But in reality, there is nothing there.

I think it is because of this that so many of us experience “identity crises.” We spend no time thinking about ourselves as ourselves, and thus, while we have crystal-clear conceptions of the world around us, we still don’t understand ourselves in the slightest.

It is also from this need to create dialectics, to create more lines, that many of more pressing problems arise. For instance, the basis of the Cold War was an Us (not U.S.) versus Them. We were the Capitalists, not the Communists. We were the religious, they were the atheist. But when the Berlin Wall fell, and Communism was no longer a real issue, we lost some our identity. We lost one of those lines, and so our shape became less defined. So what did we do? We created another Us versus Them. This was done through the War on Terror. We now have a clear Us (America, Great Britain, (aka white people, Christians, etc) and a clear Them (Iraq, Afghanistan (aka Middle Eastern people, Muslims, etc.). Professor Mark C. Taylor once said, “Aggression against is identification with.” I think that this is 100% true.

In addition, the entire current political system is based on dialectics: Blue vs. Red, Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice, Liberal vs. Conservative, etc. etc. etc..

Unfortunately, we have created a society in which the only time we feel a sense of worth is when we receive some sort of recognition from someone else. This leads to people going to absurd lengths to achieve their “15 minutes of fame.” People scale buildings, eat 40 hotdogs in 12 minutes, or kill.

The fear of being alone, and going unrecognized, is so ingrained into us we go to extreme lengths to achieve recognition. This also manifests itself by the taboo we have against being alone. The hermit is shunned. Taking a personal day is a sign of weakness. Over and over again, we are bombarded with the message that it is not okay to be by yourself. You must have friends, you must have a spouse. While all of these are certainly necessary to a fulfilling life, I think, they are certainly not all that there is.

As a society, we have made great strides in learning to comprehend the world around us. Over and over again, in form after form, be it in classes, or talking to a friend, we’re constantly observing the world around us. But despite all of that, despite all of the philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, theology, and geometry that we’ve been taught, none of it helps us to contemplate ourselves.

Sure I can say, “I asked her out, because I was strongly attracted to her looks. Her looks are important, because to my subconscious, they signal strong genetics, and my desire to procreate caused me ask her out.” I can rationalize anything, explain anything in fancy terms, based on complex Latin derivatives, and make it sound good. But what have I learned about myself? Nothing.

I realize that this entry isn’t like my other ones, and there is no incisive political wit, or funny anecdote, but I think there is still a point. I think that we really need to ask ourselves, from time to time, about ourselves. The problem is though, we don’t even know how to ask the question. It is nearly impossible, it seems, to contemplate ourselves as a thing-in-and-of-itself. I think that there are some answers in Eastern philosophy, and meditation, but I don’t know for sure. The only thing I do know is that in every person, there is a glaring absence. In the recesses of our minds, filled with information on art, literature, numbers, and emotions, there is a still a gaping cavern of self-information waiting to be filled.