To shamelessly recycle a previously used metaphor, it is as difficult to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind as it is to know what’s going on in someone else’s country. Though, I find that never stops anyone from attempting to do just that. In both cases. What genuinely interests me though, about the human mind, is not so much the modus operandi of “I know you but you don’t know me”, but the innate solitude of the mind. Any mind. This was, for a time the first limit of the mind that came to me when I started writing on this, but more on that later. The first fact of life is that the mind you have is the only one you will have full knowledge of, and, by extension the only thing you can never be in error of. Not in the sense that you can never be in error in your beliefs, or feelings, but in the sense that you know what is going on in your own mind. We don’t often think about this though, as to do so is, frankly, a bit of a downer. To do so is to see that we are alone on a desert island with only a simple palm tree, and our own carvings in the sand for company, surrounded by an expanse of unknowable, abysmal ocean. With theory and delusion we attempt to sail away from this small speck of land, and I’ll argue that the most delusional of all is The Delusion of Love. For more on the innate ability of love to break down barriers of varying manner, transcend the bitterest of conflict, and unleash an almighty, righteous beam of atomic amour, (often pink or purple) see Love, The Power Of.
Tales of someone who made a catastrophic error of judgement by loving another person unconditionally to such an extent they were unable to see that the balance of affection between one partner and the other was somewhat asymmetrical cover our real life anecdotes, books and films like shipwrecks littering the bottom of the aforementioned ocean. Though, from this perspective, love is always doomed to fail, as to love unconditionally is to suspend all critical faculty, to let down our guard of critical vigilance to breach the shores of the island of despair, and find that we can know another mind as well as we know ourselves, to be as sure that we know something else about the world, outside or our minds, as well as we know our own. From the sound of things it looks as if I’ve painted a rather bleak picture, so what are we to do? The main solution, it seems, is to be in love with a philosopher who is in recognition that to love something is to love it unconditionally, but that critical faculty should be maintained. Since that is easier said than done, the more convenient answer, to myself at least, is to be happier with solitude. There’s nothing to stop you from carving a Mona Lisa into the sand on your little solitary island, and once your learn that said island is surrounded by a metaphorical sea of error, one comes to appreciate its beauty. We go through life terrified of error and also of solitude, in a culture which coordinates error with weakness, and solitude with bitterness and abnormality.
To stay on familiar ground, railing at “the culture”, and how it is often the greatest stumbling block to the expansion of the mind beyond its limits, I draw the example which was virtually inescapable to anyone who was on the internet in 2011, which is the phenomenon of the “Bronies”. The Bronies (a portmanteau of the half word Bro and the proper word Pony) are males who are fans of the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. A study of the Brony community conducted this year called “The Brony Study” found that most respondents were in their teens to late twenties, were educated at a college or university level, and that 81% identified as heterosexual. This contradicts the popular first hand assumption anyone who has just found out about the bronies in our culture might have made. I’m willing to bet the first image that came to mind, unless you are in fact a brony or (female equivalent) pegasister, when I said grown men were watching My Little Pony was that of a basement dweller, emotionally stunted half-wit, or unrealistically camp homosexual. The fact that Friendship is Magic is a show for little girls does bring some confusion to the fore, namely over why grown men would want to genuinely, not ironically, want to watch and celebrate a show about small multicolour horses learning about the magic of friendship. Sometimes the reaction is of outright anger or derision.
Speaking as someone who has seen the show, I propose the reason is that it’s actually a good show, regardless of who it was created for. John Stewart Mill said that we accept as normal that which is usual, and let us recall that at the outset of World War One the French Army decided to kit out their soldiers in bright pink trousers, as it was considered an aggressive, martial colour, and later abandoned their use when it became apparent they made their frontline troops stick out on the battlefield like a rainforest on Mars. There was also a time when it was unbecoming for women to wear trousers.
The mind is limited, by perception, and it is the duty of art and media, to change our perception. Bronies are changing the nature of masculinity, and are expanding their perception beyond the cultural demands of what it means to possess the Y chromosome, and thus breaching the limits of the mind. So I suppose what you can take away from this is; don’t be afraid to be alone or wrong, as we’ll spend much of our time being both before we’re done here, and that what seems unusual may not be as abnormal or detrimental as it first seems.
Friendship sure is Magic,
By Edward Hobson
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31
