The Truth in Contradiction

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

In 9th grade, my friends and I loved playing video games after school.  Our acid-loving hippie art teacher didn’t mind us taking over the “Mac Lab” computers and playing Warcraft 3 directly from our USB drives.  I sunk as many hours into these game sessions as I could, happy to find an arena that I excelled in.  Computers were limited, and the losers were kicked off so I could keep my spot as long as I played well.  My last class was right by the Mac Lab so I always rushed to snag one of the first spots and then hold on as many rounds as I could.  The crowd usually thinned out once the buses left, but some of my friends would stay glued to the screens and “study late at school” as an excuse to take the late bus home instead.   

Instead of the bus, my parents would pick me up so I had to keep a watchful eye on the clock and scurry over to the car when my time was up.  It was impossible to tear myself from a really good match, so I’d often be a few minutes late as I wrapped up one last game before going home. They didn’t know my increasing tardiness was due to a gaming addiction, they imagined I was just doing normal wholesome afterschool activities with my nerdy buddies. 

Eventually, the inevitable occurred.  I lost myself too deeply in the game, I disconnected from my sense of time, and my conscious observer neglected to remind me to go home.  The late bus kids started packing up and I was slowly filled by a pit of dread as I realized what had happened.  I wasn’t just late, I was giga-late. I sprinted over to the pickup zone, and my mom was parked, fuming.  

“Where the hell were you?”
“Sorry, I lost track of time.”
“Lost track of time doing what?”

I panicked.  I didn’t want to ruin my image of being the perfect son.  I went with the excuse my late bus friends always stuck with.

“I was in the library, studying.”
“Oh, the library, you say?”

She said no, I was not in the library because she was just in the library, she could see with her eyes that I was not there, and that the librarian said I had not been by.  I was cooked. Nausea flooded my chest - what could I say to that? I was caught in a contradiction, a falsehood. I wanted her to know that I didn’t mean to lie, that I didn’t mean to be late, that I accidentally ceased to exist for a bit too long and it wasn’t really my fault.  Despite this whirlwind of thoughts, shame silenced me as she lectured about honesty and trust.

My anguish was automatic, instinctual.  I didn’t need to understand Aristotle’s models of contradiction and logic to feel this pain.  My intuitive response to lying and falsehood has been forming itself automatically since birth, with the sum of my experiences and observations all reinforcing the wrongness associated with deception or contradiction.  The incident had eroded away at my integrity, and my mother was there to bear witness.

I felt the shame of lying, but I simultaneously felt the insistent sensation that it was somehow not my fault.  I only accidentally claimed to be in the library, it didn’t feel like something that intentionally came out of my mouth.  I shouldn’t have to bear the blame for whatever strange impulse overcame me in the moments of awkward confrontation.  I said nothing about it because it’s a nonsensical sensation: I obviously should be accountable for my lie, but the feeling of faultlessness seemed so clear and true.  My actions in the moment simply didn’t feel like it was done by my deep-down true self.    

In time, I began to see moments like these as clues to a deeper truth. These experiences with contradiction planted the seeds for what would become Blob Theory, my attempt to find coherence in the paradoxes of human behavior.  The automatic reaction of my body did not feel like the same person as the conscious, willful thinker.  It seemed like there were parts of me that were at odds with each other, an incongruent disjointed jumble of selves that only pretended to exist as one cohesive singular entity.  This disquieting thought stuck with me, black ink that slowly seeped into the folds of my brain, a fundamental acknowledgement of some basic flaw in perception itself.  The more I tried to resolve it, the more the ink spread and smudged the structures of my worldview. I had a growing uncomfortable awareness that maybe a deep-down true self doesn’t even exist, that maybe a cohesive singular entity is impossible, that maybe contradiction is the default state of the universe and that Aristotle’s laws of thought are bullshit.  It would be over a decade before I found a way to put these insights into writing, and several years more before I could describe a model that captured inconsistencies in my own default intuitive model of reality. 

Next week, I will explain what I mean by a ‘cohesive singular entity’ and ‘default intuitive model’, and why these concepts challenge our belief in consistency as the cornerstone of reality. The terms themselves work by trusting consistent units with stable identities in the style of Aristotle’s laws of thought, but they themselves are deeply contradictory and don’t operate according to their very own values. 

When do you notice me contradicting myself? Take this opportunity to call me out on my inconsistencies!  Send me a message with your criticisms and observations, I can take it.