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The [[future]] contains only as-yet ''unlived'' experiences. There are ''no'' [[grievance]]s there. Our [[standpoint]]s, the margins and their [[intersectionality|intersections]] are ''unknown''.<ref>Unless you accept the data formalist’s stance that the universe is a clockwork, causal determinacy is absolute, and therefore the future is a linear extrapolating of the past. In which case, so is complaining about it. Nothing can be done, and no-one is to be blamed: we are “as flies to wanton boys”. </Ref> | The [[future]] contains only as-yet ''unlived'' experiences. There are ''no'' [[grievance]]s there. Our [[standpoint]]s, the margins and their [[intersectionality|intersections]] are ''unknown''.<ref>Unless you accept the data formalist’s stance that the universe is a clockwork, causal determinacy is absolute, and therefore the future is a linear extrapolating of the past. In which case, so is complaining about it. Nothing can be done, and no-one is to be blamed: we are “as flies to wanton boys”. </Ref> | ||
Being historical, | Being historical, an already-[[lived experience]] is permanent, and set in stone. It cannot be moved. It cannot be removed. It cannot be compensated for. It cannot be denied. It becomes a monument. A shibboleth. A sacred prophecy. But it remains our own imaginative [[construction]]. | ||
We are autobiographers. Literally, ''we talk our own book''. We choose by which significant events we define the trajectory of our own lives. We build our own memorials. We choose to live beneath their shadows. But our ''present'' is a function of ''every'' point in our past, not just the ones on which it suits us to now fixate as we construct our personal narrative. | |||
To adopt — some might say “colonise” someone else’s personal narrative is the [[Empathy|empathetic]] stance: to step into their shoes, to take sides, to exalt them and ''perpetuate'' their ''grievance''. Empathy is to ''exalt'' history, whilst pretending to ''despise'' it. | |||
The [[infinite game]] counsels us to look at where we are, see what we’ve got and make the best of it. It focuses on the decisions | But, look: standpoints ''iterate''. As the present moves through [[space-time]], we lay down the tracks of future, each new decision we make contributes to our [[lived experience]]. We ''update'' our standpoints — it is only by refusing to update our standpoint that we can optimise our grievance. There are people whose professional interests are served by optimising their own grievances. They are not fun people. They probably don’t have much fun. Don’t be like that. The decisions we, and our ancestors made, and had made about us, fall ever further away in time and significance. It is an inverse square. ''Keep moving forward, and they fall further away''. | ||
The [[infinite game]] counsels us to look at where we are, see what we’ve got now and how to make the best of it. It focuses on the decisions we can influence now and the possibilities of the future. It regards the past as informational and instructive, not constraining. If I once hit my thumb with a hammer, I know to be careful next time I use a hammer. It does not make me forever a victim of hammer abuse. | |||