You know that old riddle about the chicken and the egg and which came first? I had an idea about how to answer that, which is neither and both since they’re the same thing. You might as well ask which came first, the human or the baby. The problem isn’t that the answer is unknowable, more that the perameters are false, so you’re presented with what is in reality an absurd proposition that you have no hope of being able to find a solution to. Seems to be a good metaphor for a lot of things we encounter in life. The world presents us with an absurd set of perameters, and we just accept them, assuming more or less helplessly that an answer exists, but one that is beyond our knowing. Maybe the moral of the story is actually just, question everything?
June 17, 2015
2024 edit: False binaries really make us lose the plot when you think about it. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? You can’t answer the question because the premises are false. We might as well ask which came first, babies or humans. Same logic, same underlying false binary, just different context. It’s immediately obvious that someone who poses such a question is smoking crack. It definitely seems a bit that way with this which came first, humans or Palestinians, now subject to conspiracist Othering and scapegoating. It’s almost as though the old Osama bin Laden vintage in new Ham as bottles hoofwank is a good source of that binary-driven schism in the collective unconscious researchers like Val Plumwood talk about in the context of positively sacred gender hierarchies, and the misogynist toxic masculinity that, you know, in one form or another enslaves everyone involved. Philip K Dick, Arthur Koestler, Marx and the Wachowski sisters were all big on the individual held hostage to the split as fuck collective unconscious in one way or another if memory serves. Buying into false binaries is a deal with the devil which means we get burned in the ends kids