Every time a man utters an opinion on any matter – it is his brain trying to get a grip on the nature of consciousness. Indirectly, a man’s neural illusion of his self struggling to find and clearly see itself; acting as though endless talking about what it says is its self will accomplish that. As if inner life will eventually make it fully aware of what it is; which is like a man who has no knowledge of mathematics believing that if he keeps randomly repeating meaningless strings of numbers he will someday understand algebra; or a person who can speak no Japanese believing that if he spouts oriental sounding gibberish long enough, one day the language will suddenly become comprehensible to him; or the fabled Lancelot thinking that if he tells sufficient tales of invented exploits, he will someday magically emerge from the page and into actual existence.
Men do not speak interminably of themselves because they are vain, and self-centered, and not in an attempt to promote-themselves, nor in an effort to heal a poor self-image. An ordinary, normal, sane person talks about their self, their ideas, their dreams, their fears, their beliefs, their opinions, their past, their future, their failures, their successes, what they like, what they don’t like, what they approve of and what they disapprove of, in the never-satisfying, never-ending struggle to reveal: the-kind-of-person-they-are.
Every time a man makes a critical comment about anything, he is not actually talking about the thing he refers to, but about himself. “Country music is just noise.” “Republicans are crooks.” “Basketball is not a real sport.” These are not examples of a speaker commenting on the subjects noted, but are the speaker saying that he is not the type of person you should associate in your mind with that form of music, politics, or popular culture.
Men speak seriously only about physical matters of survival. They are not able to speak so regarding affairs in their second reality. They appear to do so, but they do not and cannot, for there is nothing that in truth can be seriously said about non-serious matters. It is an enforced game of collective pretend among men. To appear to be talking quite seriously about some qualitative aspect of some second reality matter, (abstract art, movies, morality), but everyone understands that you are actually talking about yourself. Well, you are attempting to talk about yourself; to identify who you are by the expressing of the tastes and preferences that the “you” you are looking for has; but it is all a façade, for neither you nor anyone else has any serious interest, or preference in matters that are by their own nature – non serious.
J.