MC Quixote

The Bias of No Bias Part 39

We all have our biases and prejudices and sometimes it bugs me when people say you shouldn't judge people. I think we should judge people; but what's more important is how we judge things.

One rule of thumb I have is, it's ok to make judgments on one's actions, but not a good idea to base judgments on external appearances, things like race, class, how a person dresses, where they live, what culture they come from, etc.

But if I see someone doing harm in my community, I hope I'll have the courage to judge it and do something. There's all this harm being done because people don't stand up and judge things like violence, neglect, or just plain stupid actions and no one stands up and says anything because they don't want to be a snitch or something ridiculous like that.

It's usually fear that gets people to conform to some misguided "group think". It takes courage to put yourself out there and say, "No, that's not cool. That's a bad idea. Someone is harming someone, and I need to do something." What is this peer pressure to not act? Where does it come from? Some kind of bully culture that leads to mob rule.

I try to be aware and honest about my bias's, which is hard to do. I was thinking about biases I have with writers, and the first thought was a gender bias, and I started thinking about S.E. Hinton, and how she wrote The Outsiders when she was in her teens, and then I thought maybe it's agism, and that took me to Rimbaud. He's my go-to young poet, because he wrote The Drunken Boat when he was 16! And when I found this out my first thought was, there's no way a 16-year-old could have written a poem like that. As I started to accept the idea that Rimbaud wrote this poem when he was 16, then I moved into the questions of how? How could a 16-year-old write a poem like this?

With Rimbaud I'm stuck on the sophistication of his relationship with language and human experience made evident through his poems.

... And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,

A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down; ...

A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down - wow, that strangely gives me hope. It gives me hope to think that there's a possibility that one of my peers could have these kinds of deep insights and be able to express them. He wrote some of his greatest poems before he was 18. He's a great example that a young person can develop a refined ability with language and a deep understanding of the human condition which most people conclude can't happen until one has obtained a wisdom which is usually associated with age.

In some way, did Rimbaud know he was going to die young? If 37 is young, but he killed the poet when stopped writing in his early 20s and started working and left his bohemian self behind. I can't figure out why he was able to take expression through written language so far at such a young age? It's kind of a depressing idea that you have to endure severe suffering or die if you're able to approach the sublime through artistic expression at a young age.

But then I can come up with other examples that counter this point; I mean, look at Walt Whitman, Gabriela Mistral, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bob Dylan to name a few. Maybe they suffered a lot to get there but they didn't die young.

Maybe I'm just a tragic romantic, but it does seem like there are more examples that go against this notion. Or maybe it's some romantic notion of dying young that I have. It's like comparing John Lennon to Ringo Starr. Is it because Lennon was more sophisticated than Ringo with his artistic expression that he had to die young? Or did something in his being know it was going to happen.

To counter that example there's Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. It's pretty clear that Johnny Rotten's creative expression is more developed than Sid's. I mean Rotten wrote and sang the words to "Anarchy in the UK", which seems beyond Viscous, who has been said to have had little ability on the bass. But Sid was able to pull it off somehow and because he died young, he seems to have this romantic notion fueling his legacy. And then I hear Otis Redding song and look into my under 30 club and the only resolve is that they did leave some beautiful songs.

So I go back and forth with human examples to try to come up with a window on some of the hidden laws of the human condition. In the end they all fall short of enlightenment and I come back to the age-old wisdom found in,

"We find truth by putting ourselves out there and living life, following our passion, creating things, fostering relationships, all the while being honest and sincere with these endeavors."

Getting out of my head and getting into life, with a "Be here now."engagement in the present.