Thread by @PnictogenHorses

suppose you find yourself all alone in a strange place—you recognize nothing around you, not even the stars. there's nobody to ask for help other than yourself. let us say, for the sake of example, that you don't believe in any intangible beings. no spirits, no gods.

(cont'd)

that's probably an very difficult situation for most persons on Earth to imagine. we grow up surrounded by familiar anchor points. even Earth herself is an anchor—if you believe in Earth, that is. (doesn't everyone? @elonmusk doesn't, not really; nor @MattWalshBlog.)

(cont'd)

people perhaps don't quite realize how many such anchor points they have—things they look at, things they consult, things that tell them in some direct or indirect way: "you are here, at this place, in this time." clocks and calendars are such anchors, for example.

(cont'd)

but suppose you had *nothing*. you didn't see anything familiar at all in the Sea or sky or land. all you had was *yourself*—and extreme solitude and isolation can do strange upsetting things to a person's sense of self.

q.v. Donald Crowhurst.



(cont'd)

Donald Crowhurst was a failing businessman who threw his last reserves into a dangerous gamble, a circumnavigation of the Earth (for a contest) in a boat he designed himself. the gamble ended...badly. Crowhurst, so it would seem, lost his sanity and committed suicide.

(cont'd)

Crowhurst had cut himself completely free from his moorings, even spiritually—he cut himself loose from *truth itself*, because he faced failure and could only deal with it by retreating into a maze of lies. when he found that his lies had *consequences*, it broke him.

(cont'd)

one can choose anything as an anchor for oneself, though, in a strange place—it doesn't *need* to be "truth itself". it doesn't need to be anything abstract or spiritual at all.

it could be an *object*. a volleyball, perhaps, like Tom Hanks's Wilson from "Cast Away".

(cont'd)

the object doesn't need to *talk*; one need not regard the anchoring thing as "intelligent", the way that @sama and the @OpenAI boys want to believe in the supernatural genius of their marvellous gibberish-generators. it's enough to the object to simply *exist*.

(cont'd)

even an inert object may serve as a sort of reflector for one's own ideas. it's like talking to a wall or a mirror or a headstone in a cemetery—even if you don't believe there's anyone there to listen, you can still respond to the sound of your own voice and words.

(cont'd)

that human ability to choose an object—*any* object—as a reference point and something to bounce thoughts and words from is the start of...oh, a lot of things! a lot of important and weighty concepts are rooted in this simple idea: a physical object as an anchor point.

(cont'd)

this is the start of how Christians regard the #Bible and the #Cross, for example. these are abstract concepts, yes, but they have straightforward physical equivalents—one may regard a given volume of the Bible or particular depiction of the Cross as personal anchors.

(cont'd)

there are real actual human beings who regard @mtaibbi and @elonmusk as their personal anchors, people they think of as 100% reliable and trustworthy, people who always have the truth and who always *listen*. that's what's called a "parasocial relationship".

(cont'd)

it's unwise to regard @mtaibbi as a reliable anchor because he's too "independent"; one might as well rely upon Alcibiades or Ezra Pound. but that's rather too difficult an affair to discuss at the end of a thread.

~Mona Drafter of Pnictogen

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