I have always wanted to see »beyond. My fascination with science-fiction (and fantasy) throughout my youth gave my imagination fertile food for later development.

But I was concerned about moral, ethical and philosophical questions… deeply concerned… and not theoretically… as a small child. Actually the questions were mostly about why people did things that were obviously bad. And thought in ways that made no emotional sense to me.

Of course, I was not equipped to articulate the essential necessities of my tropisms toward kindness and love. Nor the conflict between my fascination with language, and the truly bizarre (read: pathological) uses of it I commonly witnessed in adults and cultures.

But I didn’t want to see ‘just for myself’. I wanted to learn to see in ways that held the promise of returning elemental liberties embodied in our humanity. Liberties that our habits of thought and behavior deprive us of… often as a consequence of the structure and presumptions inherent in »the first move.

I believe in and value activism that is pragmatic, embodied… enacted. But learning to »see in new ways is, itself, an action. The seeing is the inaction of actual insight. Such accomplishments have little obvious or implicit extrinsic value, in a pragmatic sense. It’s something really intimate.

So the adventure of seeking insight, even when successful can appear from outside as if ‘nothing has been accomplished here’, because there may be few tangible results. And one might write or speak about it occasionally — or not. Yet the path has been traveled… and continues to evolve. From outside, there’s no advertisement of excellence or accomplishment. No product. No branding. Nothing, really.

I’m having a moment of deja-vu here, as I recall what seems a dreamlike experience of talking about this before. What I was trying to say, in simpler language was that tangible results are fine in their appropriate contexts. But some forms of insight go in an entirely other direction than this. Suggesting, for example, that »non-interference… returns degrees of liberty that must otherwise be sacrificed for the sake of ideas and their implementations… whose inclusive actual results would be have been avoided from the beginning.

Without seeing, what could possibly reasonably guide pragmatic action? It always seemed to me that something was really broken or missing in our species. The staggering limitations of our purported rationality … the unthinkable confusion of our collectives… something is broken with our seeing. Particularly as populations.

And I think I always wanted to know not merely how to understand this better, but something of… the history… of how it got to be the ways it is…