And it’s true, sometimes we know what to do, but we don’t know how we know, and we can’t explain why we should do what we know we should do. We see the truth dimly, but it’s not all there and we can’t put it all together. So we tune out the noise and the chaos and the confusion and we try to help that dim vision to grow. Sometimes that feeling in your gut can lead you to the truth about what you know you should do when nothing else could.

But your gut can also be a liar. Your gut can be the most deceitful voice of all. Your gut can tell you what you want to believe, and make it feel so true and right that you want to believe it with everything you have. You know it’s not true, you know it’s a lie, but you want so much to believe it, and your gut makes it possible. So you reject the unpleasant truth in favor of the wonderful lie.

That way lies horror. Down that road you find atrocity, indifference, hatred, prejudice. Follow your gut and you may find truth, or you may find the most filthy of lies.

Listen to your gut. But don’t follow it blindly.

Knowledge is power. That’s not only true when people try to keep what they know to themselves: just because you’re not intentionally hiding something doesn’t mean it’s not a secret. A good word here is “esoteric.” My knowledge of the UNIX operating system is esoteric, even though anyone could learn it if they took the time. And that knowledge leads to a kind of power, which could be abused (take a look at the BOFH archives for a satirical take on the abuse of “lusers” by IT staff: be warned, the BOFH is not a nice guy). Knowledge of financial accounting rules can also be esoteric, and it too can be used and abused to take advantage of others (think financial fraud). It’s not that there’s a plot to preserve the secrecy of UNIX or of accounting rules. Both are subjects most people consider to be dry and boring, and they’re not interested in learning them even if the opportunity presents itself. So most don’t learn, and those who do end up having power of a sort over those who don’t.

Most often the power knowledge brings is no big deal. Knowing how to cook means you have more say on meals. Knowing the latest fashion trends means you can heap scorn on those who don’t. Knowing how to fix a leak in the plumbing means you can make others pay you when they have a plumbing problem. And so on: knowledge is power, but once we’re adults these kinds of power don’t usually bother us.

Science is knowledge on an institutional scale, and it’s most definitely power. Many people think this means that science gives us control over the world around us. It does give us that. But for the enlightenment thinkers who were making the first fumbling steps toward what we today call science and technology, science was so much more. Science meant having a way to understand the world and ourselves without having to rely on the authority of others. Science meant freedom from books written by centuries-dead foreigners. Science meant ownership of your own conscience, and freedom from government-mandated religion. Not literal freedom since that wouldn’t come until later, but moral freedom, the freedom to believe that it’s okay to disagree even if only in the privacy of your own heart. Martin Luther took ownership of his conscience from the Catholic church in fear and desperation, but the scientific method later provided a way for others to do the same at far lower personal cost.

Once you give yourself permission to disagree in the privacy of your own heart it’s only a matter of time before you want to make that disagreement public. The idea of science as an alternative to reading the classical texts and listening to clerics was revolutionary. In just a few centuries it upended the moral and political order of the western world. No longer were the church and the state in charge of what people could know, now anyone who wanted (and who had the education, money, time, and talent) could make truth their own personal property. They could go out and perform experiments and read books written by other like-minded radicals. They rejected the scholasticism of the medieval church completely, forgetting how indebted they were to the hair-splitting and logic-chopping that had come before. No longer was truth something to be doled out by the clerics. The playing field had been leveled and truth made available to the great mass of people. Or so they thought.

Knowledge is power, and by winning the argument that knowledge depended on experiments and training rather than on being part of the religious and political establishment enlightenment thinkers were able to take this power for themselves. First it was the abstract and fuzzy power of knowing that you have the truth, but once people accepted that science had the authority of truth political and religious power followed. These proto-scientific radicals were the forbearers of our own age of research grants, technicians and laboratories, but they pushed their argument with ideological zeal because they were convinced that once everyone accepted science’s claim to truth the world would be a better place. They believed that science broke the pattern in which knowledge leads to power which leads to the abuse of power. They argued that the knowledge imparted by science was freely available to all, regardless of circumstance, and so could never be a means of tyranny. If sometimes they realized that reality fell short of this ideal it was always because the dream hadn’t been realized quite yet. True, not everyone could afford an education, but  once science was in charge of government poverty would be eliminated. True, religious wars and fanaticism were rampant, but once dogmatism was defeated true reason would prevail everywhere. They said this again and again, and they believed it because they saw no hope otherwise.

Looking back at these naive radicals it’s easy to see how wrong they were. We do live in a golden age (anyone who says different has closed their eyes to history), but it’s not the golden age that enlightenment thinkers had in mind. It’s a golden age rife with inequality and powerlessness, and not always in spite of the advances due to science but because of them. The growth of science has fostered incredible inequalities in military might and economic power. It has lead to weapons that dwarf the capacity of any individual to comprehend, or combat. It has lead to state-run bureaucracies that micro-manage their populations to a degree undreamed of by prior civilizations. It has lead to feelings of alienation and radicalization, where people feel that they must either drown in the anonymity and mechanization of the modern age or fight it tooth and nail. It’s not all the fault of science, by any means. But science, for all its incredible successes, has failed to deliver on an important point: it is not the democratization of knowledge.

Science is esoteric because there is too much of it for all of us to understand. You need to become an expert in order for your opinion to matter. Were I to put forward a new theory on how to reconcile quantum theory with general relativity I would quite rightly be laughed at and ignored. I have a college freshman’s understanding of these subjects, and though it was acquired at the expense of a great deal of money and effort that’s not enough for me to genuinely understand the issues. For that I would have to spend a good many more years of my life studying, and I would need to display an adequate level of scientific and mathematical ability before I would be taken seriously by the scientific community. Without being taken seriously by the scientific community there’s no way that I would be taken seriously by the mainstream of the non-scientific community. I don’t say this because it’s wrong: it’s entirely appropriate for me to be ignored when I have nothing to contribute to the conversation. But appropriate or not, it places me in a position of weakness. When it comes to science I must accept that I am in an inferior position vis a vis scientists. I am a second-class citizen in this domain.

Fortunately I’m okay with that, and I think that most people are okay with that most of the time. It doesn’t hurt my self-esteem to know that I can’t debate physics with Stephen Hawking. Even scientists have to put up with this, since the area of specialty of an individual scientist is usually quite narrow. Inside their own small areas scientists can pontificate to their heart’s content. But outside that sub-sub-discipline they’re much like the rest of us: they have to accept that they’re not experts either. But that’s no big deal, there’s plenty left in life to worry about without getting upset over being disrespected in quantum physics discussions.

This power dynamic isn’t only true of technological sciences, it’s also true of  less applied subjects like philosophy or literature. If philosophy and the arts can be studied and argued about there will be those who have spent the time to do so and those who have not. Our system of universities and professorships recognizes those who are experts and puts them in touch with each other so that they can carry on that discussion: those who have paid their dues to the system will be more able to talk about these subjects than those who have not. But unlike with science the questions under discussion here are so broad and vaguely delineated that they’re difficult to compartmentalize and put aside. They’re far more likely to verge into territory that I consider to be central to my life. Ethics, the nature of meaning and thought, how it is that we can know things, our own nature and that of ultimate reality, these are all subjects that philosophy claims special authority over. The arts lay claim to their own bit to say about aesthetics, passion, and human experience. I can safely put quantum physics to the side as something that has little direct bearing on my life: it takes nothing away from me and mine that I must accept others’ authority in that area. But can I say the same for ethics?

But in fact, science doesn’t always stay safely compartmentalized either. It’s continually breaking out with implications about what we ought to believe about the past or the future, or about our selves, that challenge our own wishes. As the enlightenment forbearers of modern science taught, science is open to dispute and disagreement. But to disagree on science’s own terms is to venture into territory where we are weak and scientists are powerful. Doing so invites vulnerability. It’s tempting instead to refute, not the particular point at issue, but science itself. It may seem paradoxical, but it’s actually much easier to decide that all science is bunk than it is to disagree with a particular point. Rather than having to address the reasons for a particular claim point by point, science can be criticized in vague and general terms without exposing oneself to the risk of counter-argument. This is particularly true since it’s a debate that takes place outside the confines of science itself, so the home court advantage scientists normally enjoy is eliminated.

We depend on the technology that science has given us. This is a more powerful argument for science than any abstract reason could provide, and no more effective argument for education and thought has ever existed. But science, like all learning, is a fickle provider. It forces us to make ourselves vulnerable to each other in order to play the game. And sometimes it gives us things we’d rather not have, which brings our vulnerability home to us in a way we’d often rather not face.

I believe that this is a good thing. Vulnerability isn’t fun, but it’s not bad either. It’s part of what it is to be human, and making ourselves vulnerable to each other is the only way for us to grow. But in order to see why we should embrace all kinds of thinking, including science, we have to make ourselves face up to why we may not always want to.

Parmenides was one of the ancient Greek philosophers who lived and worked in the time before Socrates. Today his student Zeno, who came up with the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, is better known. (Zeno’s other paradoxes are worth looking at as well if you’re not familiar with them.) Today even those who have heard of Zeno probably haven’t heard of Parmenides, but in his own time Parmenides was the more influential thinker. He wrote a poem, of which only a few fragments remain, that divided ways of thinking about the world into two parts: you can think about what is, or you can think about what is not. In a move that’s typical of philosophy (and especially typical of the Greeks) he looks at what appears to be simple and obvious and treats it with the utmost seriousness. Can we really think about what is not, that is, what doesn’t exist or what doesn’t have some quality? When we do so we are thinking about something that is not true of the world: something that doesn’t exist, or isn’t the way we imagine it to be. We are in essence thinking about an illusion and saying that it’s false, yet we don’t expect either falsity or the illusion to be found in the world. So Parmenides rejects the attempt to understand the world in terms of what it isn’t, and claims that if we are to understand the world as it truly is we must adhere strictly to positive claims (that the world is such-and-such) and avoid negative claims (that the world is not such-and-such). Because of this he argued that what others say about the world is “two-headed” and full of confusion.

Parmenides’ argument against thinking about that-which-is-not is sometimes called the problem of negative existentials, though in my view Parmenides’ argument doesn’t merely rule out negative existentials, he rules out negative claims of any kind. But even on the view that only existential claims are out of bounds this looks like a paradox since accepting it apparently means rejecting much of what is common knowledge about the world. If we can’t make negative claims about the world we can’t say that unicorns don’t exist, or that there is no longer a king in France. In fact, if you understand it as I do (i.e., not limited to existentials) the problem goes deeper since many apparently positive statements only make sense if we understand them as implying a negative claim. In order to make sense of change, for example, you have to think that something isn’t the way it once was. I can’t say that a tomato turned red because that involves claiming that it wasn’t red before, which is a negative claim. Likewise, I can’t talk about something being different at different places because that also involves a negative claim. Saying that a piece of paper has a red spot means saying that it’s not red around the spot. This problem is so sweeping that talking about characteristics at all is a problem since saying that something is one way always involves claiming that it is not some other incompatible way. So I can’t even just say that the paper is red because by doing so I also mean to say that the paper is not green: that’s part of what it means to be red. Negative claims are an integral part of our language from the ground up: there isn’t anything we can say that doesn’t on examination turn out to include a negative claim as part of its meaning. If we can’t use negative claims to talk about the world we apparently can’t talk about the world at all. I can’t say that the paper is red and I can’t say that it isn’t.

But apparently we manage to get by anyway. This is why people who read Parmenides tend to start with the assumption that he must be wrong. But it strikes me as unreasonable to think that Parmenides wasn’t aware of the fact that we can’t avoid talking about ways the world is not. Parmenides’ poem itself includes an important example: it says that talking about how the world is not doesn’t work. This makes Parmenides out to be saying something like the liar’s paradox: “I am lying to you right now.” But if you look closely at the text of the poem Parmenides left himself a way out: what the poem actually says is that we are forbidden from any attempt to understand the world as it is not. The text is surprisingly careful to phrase its main point as an exhortation, not as a claim about the world.

Most people don’t much care whether they understand the world as it really is, they’re more interesting in keeping a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. Even philosophers need such things. However flawed and mixed up our way of talking about the world may be it works well enough to keep us alive, and we’re not likely to stop doing it just because we’re convinced that it doesn’t get at the real truth. It’s unfair to Parmenides to think that that’s what he wanted us to do. There’s no way to know for sure, but I imagine that this is why the much larger second part of Parmenides’ poem (most of what we have comes from near the beginning) was devoted to “mortal opinions” which indiscriminately mix the way the world is with the way the world isn’t. Parmenides understood that this way of thinking about the world was deeply flawed, but I think he also understood that it was necessary. In the finest tradition of literary irony he tells us the way the world is to the best of his ability, but he prefaces it with words from the goddess saying that it’s merely mortal opinion, and a “deceitful ordering of words.” Mortal opinions may not tell us anything about the way the world really is, but we can’t get by without them.

I think this is why Parmenides is careful to phrase his arguments against understanding the world in negative terms as an exhortation: if it’s a claim about the world then it refutes itself. As truth it inevitably falls short but as exhortation it’s advice, and it can be good advice even if it doesn’t tell us about the world. Parmenides tells us that language is irredeemably flawed, and the flaw doesn’t lie merely in the words we use but in the nature of the ideas behind the words. This point is all-inclusive, it applies even to itself. This flaw runs through the foundation of language and thought itself.

I still believe that the world is real and certain, so I don’t think I’ve given up on the core of absolutism. But our language isn’t as solid as the world: the world doesn’t contradict itself but what we say about the world certainly can and does. So my absolutism has somehow been combined with the sort of wishy-washy relativism I used to despise.

Heaven is supposed to be a state of bliss. We’re supposed to be totally and absolutely happy, full of a joy that consumes us entirely. If we’re that happy we’re not going to get tired of eternal life. Nor are we ever going to decide we want to throw in the towel and die for good this time, if only that were possible. If it were just ordinary happiness there’s nothing to say we couldn’t also be unhappy, since it’s quite possible to be unhappy and happy at the same time. Just because you’re glad to see a friend at a funeral doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten why you’re there. Bliss is the kind of thing that, if you have it, it dominates you. You can be a little bit happy, but not a little bit blissful. So heaven is a place, or a state of being, where you just can’t be unhappy. It’s not just unlikely or against the rules, it’s impossible. That’s a good thing, because if you’re going to be there forever you’d better never get tired of it.

But what does that mean? It’s one thing to say, oh yeah, in heaven you can’t possibly be unhappy. I can also talk about round squares but that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to understand me. If I were guaranteed bliss would I still be me? I can have bliss now in a way, just drug me into a stupor. If I were given the right drugs I’m sure I’d have no complaints. I may not live very long, but that wouldn’t be a problem if I were already dead. Is that what heaven is supposed to be: a drugged stupor that goes on forever, a high with no crash at the end?

Surely not. It’s not that I wouldn’t enjoy it, because I’m sure I would. The same goes for being drugged: I’d probably be deliriously happy whether I wanted to be or not. If you could take away all the negative consequences of being drugged would you do it?

I wouldn’t. What would be left of who I am? I care about things and I care about people. If I were happy even though everything I cared about doing was left undone, and all the people I care about were far away and unhappy I’d be… well, I’d like to say I’d be unhappy, but that’s not true is it? I’d be happy anyway. That’s what makes this vision so horrifying. I’d have nothing and no one and I wouldn’t care any more. It wouldn’t just be me with all the things I care about taken away, it’d be a version of me, a corruption of me really, that doesn’t care about any of the things I care about now. I don’t want that kind of bliss. I don’t want to be that kind of person.

Of course, just because bliss means I’d be happy even without any of the things I care about that doesn’t mean I can’t have any of those things. What if I had all my friends and family with me, and they were all happy, and all the things I cared about doing were done, and so on? Even so I don’t want bliss if it means forced happiness. I’m not just an emotion-producing machine. I don’t want a bliss that is just painted, however indelibly, onto my psyche. If I’m going to be happy I want it to be because I’ve got good reason to be happy, and I want to be able to be unhappy if I’ve got good reason for that. A grafted-on bliss would be a corruption of who I am, not a fulfillment of who I am.

Bliss, if it’s to be something I actually want, can’t be something that’s just given to me. It has to be a justified bliss, a bliss that I have good reason to experience. It must be a real bliss and not an illusion of bliss, however like real bliss the illusion might seem. But what could possibly justify eternal bliss? It couldn’t be anything ordinary like getting the job I want, or going on a trip. That’d be nice but it’s not bliss. What, then?

We’re back where we started. Remember from part one that the problem with eternal life was that we’d run out of things to do. If we could do anything and everything as often as we wanted for as long as we wanted we’d eventually become jaded, and what once satisfied would cease to satisfy. Having more time isn’t the answer, really it’s the problem. Now it turns out that bliss doesn’t solve that problem so much as point out the need for a solution. Bliss is what we need if we’re going to endure eternity, let alone enjoy it. Yet we don’t know of anything that would give us adequate reason to be blissful.

Next time: fulfillment.

If you work in the news industry or in politics you probably think I’m crazy. You probably think that opinion polls are wonderful things. You can go find out everyone’s views on the latest hot topic then turn around and tell them what they think. It’s great business. Everyone likes to hear about themselves, so a good opinion poll can generate news cycle after news cycle. You get to hammer the public again and again and again with poll after poll, letting them know what they think about their elected officials, current events, or the possibility of life on Mars.

It’s no wonder people’s minds turn to jelly.

If you care enough to try (and lets assume that you do) getting opinion polling right is very hard. First you’ve got to decide who is going to answer your questions. This is tricky because your choice has got to be totally random or the mathematical magic that ensures that the views of your small group are like the views of everyone else doesn’t work. In fact, pollsters are getting worried about this because more and more people are giving up their land line based telephone in favor of a cell phone. People who’ve given up land lines don’t necessarily have the same views as those who haven’t, so if enough people switch current polling techniques aren’t going to work. No one’s sure yet what to do if that happens, but I’m confident they’ll figure something out. If the solution isn’t perfect, that’s okay, it’ll be good enough. Polling is big business.

A more subtle and difficult problem is the wording of the question. Admittedly, there’s nothing subtle about push polling, where a “poll” is taken solely to change the views of those polled. But a poll doesn’t have to be an attack add dressed up as a series of questions in order to give the results a particular bias. Poll takers say that questions must be worded in a clear and neutral way. That’s true. But putting it that way makes it seem easier than it is. Even the experts can get this one badly wrong. Something as minor as the order in which questions are asked can affect the outcome of the poll. And let’s say you do get it wrong, how would you know? Maybe you’d wonder if the results were surprising in some way, but otherwise you’d never suspect. And even if you did know, all you could do is give the poll again. Hopefully you get it right the second time around, or at least get it wrong in a new and different way. Otherwise you’d have to conclude that you had it right in the first place. The only way to verify a poll is another poll.

But what about when you tell everyone about the results of the first poll before you give the second one? Does knowing what all your friends believe have an effect on what you believe? How about knowing what the rest of the country believes? Maybe if you’ve thought a great deal about an issue you’re not going to change your mind, but what about the rest of the time? If you’re a grump like me you probably enjoy thinking that you’re better than everyone else, so you’ll try hard to find reasons not to believe what others believe. If you’re not quite such a grump you may be free of that particular foible, but that doesn’t mean you make up your mind in a vacuum. Maybe you’re a nicer guy, and tend to the reasonable view that if everyone else believes something chances are good that it’s true. Regardless of how it affects you, only a fool would think that knowing what all your friends believe would have no impact on what you believe.

Yet that’s exactly the assumption behind the business of opinion polling. As far as polling organizations are concerned opinions are a cash crop and people are merely the vegetable matter that produces them. (And politics is… never mind.) But what makes the poll results valuable, at least in theory, is that they are discovering something previously unknown. If opinion polls aren’t pulling something real and meaningful out of the collective psyche why should anyone be interested in what they have to say? But if what they’re collecting consists in part of the echoes of previous opinion polls what’s the point? Even if there were real data buried in there somewhere there how could you ever separate it out?

I know what you’re thinking. Maybe polls do influence what people believe. So subsequent polls are picking that effect up along with anything else that may have affected the public’s thinking in the last few days. So what? That doesn’t invalidate polls if you’re an intelligent consumer of polling information. After all, people are thinking it. Maybe it’s partly because of the latest poll, but it could also be the latest scandal. It doesn’t matter whether it’s either of those or something else. It still influences that holy relic of democracy, the vote.

And that’s quite true. After all, it’s not as if we expect people to be capable of thought, or to have anything worthwhile to contribute to the governing of the nation. We don’t expect them to have thoughtful and nuanced views on public policy. If polling amplifies the thoughtless and drowns out anything complex or substantive in noise that’s okay, we know it’s no big loss because we know most people aren’t capable of more. Maybe things would be different if we had a less consumerist and mass media driven society, but we have to work with the society we live in. In the end people are just beads on a giant abacus, and their opinions are how we keep score. It’s us, the few who actually think and who have a vision for the future, that play the game. We don’t expect to see our views reflected in opinion polls, we just rage at how stupid and easily led everyone else is when we feed them on a steady diet of their own regurgitated opinions.

All quite true. But that doesn’t make it right. Boycott polls.

But epistemology isn’t the only discussion to have about a religion. One important question is: as it is represented does it actually address the human condition? If the resolution it provides for the difficult problems people face is genuine that’s a powerful reason to take it seriously, whether we’re talking about a particular religion or religion in general. On the other hand, if that resolution is merely a smokescreen that causes people to forget about and ignore their problems then maybe Marx was right when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. A religion’s claims could be quite true, but if the resolutions it provides to life’s problems turn out not to resolve those problems then it is still an illusion and even more damaging than if it were false.

Take death. Everybody’s got to die, but that doesn’t mean we like it. An afterlife seems like a great idea: we die, but it’s not the end of the story. If we handled our life right (whether that means having the right relationship with God, or behaving according to the right moral code, or whatever) we do more than merely continue on after death. We get to experience bliss beyond our wildest dreams, free of all of the nasty bits of life. Forever.

But let’s ask a question that may seem a bit silly: why should I want an afterlife? That’s a ridiculous question in a way. Everyone knows that eternal life in heaven is all anyone could ever want. Those who criticize it usually do so because it’s so unrealistic, such an absurdly good thing that it couldn’t possibly exist in this humdrum world. But stop for a moment and forget everything you know about the afterlife. Then take it all back up again, but look at it closely as you do. It seems pretty nice at first glance. But an afterlife isn’t just a phenomenal improvement to your health. It’s beyond death. Once you’ve died and are “living” your afterlife you’re done with that. You live forever.

Forever?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got plenty of things I’d like to do. If I had forever to do them I’d be able to relax and take my time (vacations every other week?) and still get it all done. I wouldn’t have to worry about running out of time, it’d get done no matter how laid back I was about it. And I’d still have time afterward. I’d still have forever.

Maybe you could find something to occupy you for the first hundred million years. And the second. Maybe even the third. But sooner or later you’ll have done everything. Again, and again, and again. You’ll have lost count of how many times you’ve done everything there is to do. Then guess what? You get to start over at the beginning and do it all again. That doesn’t sound very nice to me. In fact, it sounds downright horrifying. That’s not heaven, that’s hell.

And that’s exactly right. Trying to imagine heaven we accidentally came up with hell: we forgot to include God. In all the accounts of heaven that’s the most important detail, the bit that distinguishes heaven from hell. Heaven isn’t just eternal life free of want. It’s also communion with God and eternal bliss. All of the usual imagery could apply to hell as easily to heaven. Streets paved with gold and mansions lining the streets wouldn’t detract an iota from the hellishness of hell. It’s kind of scary in a way: what if I were at the pearly gates and chose the wrong door? Would I be able to tell the difference between heaven and hell by looking? Can I see what bliss looks like while outside looking in? What is bliss, anyway?

It’s not eternal life that makes heaven desirable. The question “why should I want an afterlife?” may have seemed silly but like a lot of other obvious things it’s not so obvious after all. The question still needs an answer. Next time: bliss.

I could say that it’s because curmudgeons like me are useful to have around, even if unpleasant.  That, like Socrates, we’re gadflies that sting society in tender places.  We stir the lumbering leviathan to move when it cannot stir itself. But I don’t really believe it. It’s not that I think my grumpiness is unjustified. I just don’t think it does any good. People just get annoyed and throw up flimsy defenses to convince themselves that criticisms don’t apply to them. It’s always everybody else who’s  misbehaving, it’s those others who are behind the ills of society. Not that I’m any different. I do the same thing and only rarely (and usually too late to do any good) do I see it. That’s how we human beings are: we never admit we’re wrong unless we want to, which isn’t often.

But giving up being a curmudgeon would mean giving up part of who I am. I’m a pain in the butt because I don’t like the way things are. I try to hold it in unless I think I have something constructive to say, which is rare. No one should have to listen to negativity to no purpose. But it leaks out anyway. There’s nothing I can do about it short of trying not to see the things I don’t like, and I’m not going to do that.

So I’m a pain. And sometimes I bring others pain. And I’m not going to change.