Personal manifestos are something I used to write often when I was younger, when everyone was making a lot of assumptions about who I was as a person and I didn't have the opportunity to speak for myself. So I wrote for myself, a lot, and I never shared them with anyone. I haven't really written one since I was about sixteen, probably since I've since found a better support system and gotten much better at asserting myself in situations where I don't have one. However, bits and pieces of this have been turning over in my mind for a while, so I thought I'd write them out in a weird psychobabble word vomit just so I could start to structure them a bit more coherently. This is nowhere near finished but it's a start.
Quotes taken from Dune and DS9, with apologies.
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Thesis statement: understanding as surrender. To truly know anything, you have to give up something of yourself in the process– sidestepping the self-identity on occasion in favor of total alignment with the Other.
"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."
"To become a thing is to know a thing. To assume its form is to begin to understand its existence."
There's joy in relinquishment. Terror, too, but that's part of the joy. Like going up the first big hill on a rollercoaster. Part of cultivating resilience– understood as a conscious delight in the fluidity of sentient existence, a willingness to embrace the process rather than clinging to its results from one moment to the next– is living in the joy rather than the terror. This is not a rejection of identity, but a celebration of identity as something lived-in and ephemeral, something one creates rather than something by which one is created.
Build something that cannot bend, and it will break. Stasis will shatter you in the end.
I love personal manifestos, as you've told, it helps to have a compass in an uncertain world. Something we'll follow even when we are not completely sure of where to go.
These last months I was thinking of my organization's manifesto, my personal manifesto, our mainly manifesto.
Has been a great excercise.
I'm not sure if people completely surrender their old beliefs when they learn something new. If our brains are the perceptrons we say they are, we usually just reinforce new beliefs with constant exposure to new proof over time, whilst older beliefs linger and fade. It's a slow transitional thing, and your identity changes probably in the same way that your body does over time.
Also, your post reminds me of Olaf Stapleton's Starmaker, where consciousnesses merge and create meta-consciousness that eventually constitute a galaxy sized brain
I don't know if I'd say the worldview I've begun to lay out here is right for everyone, or applies to everyone. This is just a metacognitive framework I've built up based on my own experiences, and my own experiences tell me that holding onto a static perception of my own identity and way of seeing the world will only hold me back from growth. It's almost an affirmation to myself to not be afraid of what I'm capable of becoming, because that'll lead to me pretending to be something I'm not long after I've outgrown it.
Interesting rec. Wonder if it inspired the Great Link at all. I'll have to check it out.
Definitely agree that identity is fluid and should be allowed to explore at all costs.
As for DS9, it's somehow the one Trek I've never quite watched -- despite all the great stories I've heard about it
I also highly recommend DS9. It deals with the theme of how a self-consciously Utopian society can uphold its ideals under less than conducive conditions, and while living side by side with people with very different values.
In my opinion, it's unambiguously the best Trek series. (I have not watched any NuTrek except for Lower Decks and Prodigy, and I've only watched a little of Enterprise.)
I loved Lower Decks, to me it's more of a true Trek successor than Discovery. I will definitely dig into DS9
I also loved Lower Decks, at least after the first half of season 1, when it finds its feet. The good thing about it is that it really commits to being a sequel to the 90s series (TNG, DS9, VOY), set around 2380, and doesn't try to change the setting like most of the rest of NuTrek does.
Prodigy is like this, somewhat. It starts in the Delta Quadrant, and the main characters have had little or no contact with the Federation, but contextual clues suggest it's set around the same time as LD. They did the right thing to change the setting by actually changing the setting and putting it completely outside of Federation space, instead of changing the Federation (PIC) or rewriting its history (DIS).
Prodigy looks really cutsified though and aimed at kids, is it genuinely worth watching?
It is very much a kids' show, and that's something to take into account. People have called it the "Clone Wars" of Star Trek, and I think that's accurate. It takes a group of non-human teenagers from a grungy crapsack society and shows them what the Federation is and stands for, without any interaction from any Federation citizens except a hologram of Captain Janeway.
It actually works very well, but I also have to say I have kids, and watch a lot of (the best-regarded) animated kids' shows with them. If you have liked things like Avatar: the Last Airbender, The Dragon Prince, or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, you would also probably like Prodigy. If you can't stand animated kids' shows at all, then no, you should skip it.
It's excellent. I highly recommend it. I actually just got my best friend of several years and their partner to watch it and I'm still kind of riding that high.