Do you want me to be equal to you? Would you rather I be inferior to you so that you could dominate me? Would you rather I be superior to you so that I could assist you in beneficial ways?
Imagine it's 1995, you're a burglar in Brazil. You've broken into a house, you're in the process of picking up the TV to steal it, and then Royce Gracie and the rest of his black-belted jiu-jitsu family appear dressed in Gi, standing between you and the doorway. Do you shit yourself immediately or do you drop the TV and then shit yourself?
This issue may not be debatable any more, but Tom Brady seems to be the modern American equivalent of a Greek God. But ... which Greek God? I think Athena. Forget the gender, we're talking gods here. Look at who Athena was: born fully grown from the head of Zeus, dressed in a football helmet and body armor; skilled in the art of quarterbacking leadership; victorious when it matters most. Athena never lost a battle, so Tom is inferior in that sense. Athena never had a spouse nor children whereas Tom has nested (fail, Tom.; Athena taught women to cook, sew, and weave and ... what have you done for women, Tom? Tom is still alive and appears to be ageless and immortal so he and Athena share those traits.
Given all of that, maybe he's like a minor god who was born from a woman's hoohah rather than the crown of a God's head. That can't be a fun way to be born. As if being born could be fun in any way, going from a cozy womb to the hellish world. There's your Garden of Eden, by the way, inside the womb. Who puts the Tree of Knowledge in a womb? Or is the apple in the birth canal? If so, if you're born through a C-section or the head of a Greek God, I guess you wouldn't have Original Sin that way.
Wouldn't that be something? If the moral trend of the future was to make a moral judgment on another person based on whether they were born through a vagina or through a C-section? You're born with Original Sin if you come out of the pussy, but you're like Jesus in the sense of being sin-free. The pussy, Judaic, Christian, and Muslim genesis of sin. Was the Fall of Man the fall from the womb into the vagina and out into the world? Was the woman walking when she gave birth?
Maybe she was in those days. Pre-civilization, including all known civilizations around the world, whichever is suspected to be oldest, way before that even, maybe women walked and the baby slid right out, fell from Grace (apparently the mother's name), all filled up with Original Sin, maybe a physical substance that gets in all of the orifices of the baby being born. The possibilities are endless if we're just here to speculate.
But what are we really doing, and where and when are we doing it? We've got five senses (many of us) and apparently six questions: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Why and how have already happened. The who is us. Where is wherever each of us are and when is now and the future. Those are the parameters. What is whatever we decide to do (and everything else that we choose not to do).
What if professional sports athletes around the world dropped their competitive pro careers for contemporary dance, ballet, acrobatics, and other physical performance art? What would be the impact of many of the world's greatest athletes appearing in a modern dance ensemble or, as individual performers, taking on Danny Kaye's role in "Holiday Inn":
Note the sequence where Danny Kaye performs a modern dance routine entitled, "Choreography," a kind of spoof on the contrast between modern dance, jazz and tap dance. The movements in "Choreography" are deliberately exaggerated to show the purpose of modern dance steps and movements. Modern Dance
Imagine the impact of troupes made up of LeBron James, Anthony Edwards, Derrick Henry, Ronaldo, Israel Adesanya, Megan Rapinoe, and other internationally renowned athletes dropping their sports for greater performance challenges, moving their bodies in ways they've never explored, discovering movements that in their personal experience and public display provide intimacies of expression and reception neither they nor we ever knew were possible, all while traveling the world to display these gifts in person, to create experiences substantively beyond winning, losing, profiting, and spectating for everyone involved. Imagine.
Could Tom Brady be great in roles other than team-leader and quarterback-conqueror? I can understand the desire to continue experiencing the same experience over and over again, but every pinnacle I've ever reached did not beg for repeated experiences. Instead, they whispered, "Appreciate this even as it gives way to what comes next." At a certain point, mastering any given game becomes either a lifetime achievement or one achievement among many over the course of a life.
But even that is to think only in relation to achievement. Achievement is, of course, important to each of us no matter the public reception -- though if it is only for public reception it is inadequate for fulfillment -- but it is not all we are or all which we experience being. Viewing the bedding of a sexual partner as the bedding of a sexual partner is a dominating attitude. It need not even be perceived or felt by the other as such and, thus, their experience is detached from one another. This detached bedding is an inadequate act in relation to the potentiality inherently possible within a bedding experience.
And, yes, I'm enjoying using the word "bedding" here because I childishly find it amusing to use the word in such a sterilized context. But passion narrowly expressed in such an attitude diminishes the possibility of becoming more than a thing that attempts to dominate. It's of a low quality within the satisfaction-index of experiences. If there's anything that is desired in such a sex act, it is to see within the eyes of the other the flicker of recognition that they* are being dominated and whatever subsequent messages the eyes may give in the following moments: will it be "Oh my God, I'm being raped!" or "Oh my God! Am I being raped? Am I turned on by this or not? I'm going to let this continue for a bit longer to explore how I feel about this." or "Oh, wow, they* really want to devour me! This is so fucking hot!"
*I love this LGBTQ use of the pronoun "they" as a stand-in for he, she, s/he, etc.; it's so liberating as a writer to not have to think that way using language. I can focus energy on other phrasing possibilities without having to give such weight to hyper-individualistic pronoun distinctions or the gendered identity of a person, especially if I'm writing of a person as a being rather than as a set of identities. It's all "they" all the time! See how moral distinctions of good or bad and factual distinctions of true or false don't have to be used in the assessment of value?
Inadequacy or underfulfillment due to narrowness of focus on achieving a specific desired outcome is a way of saying "less than, but not zero or less than zero." There exists content, that much can be said with levels of certainty even scientists agree upon. If they didn't, they wouldn't have become and remained scientists. But it's a leap to make a moral or factual judgment without first understanding how one came to demand such interpretations of perceptual content. One could say brain research is still exploring the emergence of content within oneself. That is fine, but a narrow project in scope even though potential meanings are innumerable.
The psychology that has anything adequate to say about experience is found in relation to neuropsychology. Much of psychology's historical content is proving to be inadequate and childish in the face of biology's discoveries the past twenty-to-thirty years. We are social creatures through and through. Even the so-called introverts are extroverts on the lower end of the extroversion scale. The idea that any person is not outward-facing is a lie. Even Ted Kaczynski sent his bombs into the world to specific people with whom he felt a relationship. A disturbed relationship, but still a relationship in spite of most of his time being spent in physical seclusion. He made his presence felt, this extreme introvert.
So we all present ourselves to one another in some way, intentionally or otherwise. We don't live in caves and even those who do seem to come down the mountain for supplies and mail every now and then. We are interdependent and that is biologically, economically, politically, culturally, educationally, socially, and otherwise dependent on one another. Our mutual well-being better insures our individual well-being. To think about the group is to think in a more expansive way about the self and one's self-interests.
Manipulation is exhausting and can lead to 3000-year grudges (See Israel/Palestine). Transparency and the refusal to be morally or factually demanding of the other can be more successful than deception and oppositional strategy. Collaboration creates exponentially more than is necessary for all participating whereas competition assures that half lose out on what is necessary while half gain access to something that is always in jeopardy of being taken away against their will. It's a strategy for winning very little of value while losing most of what is meaningful.
If what is being discovered in neurobiology and neuropsychology provide relatively new scientific insights on human experience, phenomenology and art long ago anticipated these recent scientific findings. Even Kant was onto some things that were critical, but it was especially Hegel who directed explorations toward the experience of being that have produced results that science is only now beginning to realize. If one is versed in Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Adorno, and others, one is way ahead of the scientific game of providing insight into what experiences may be constitutively.
Because biology and psychology are "determinative" creators of knowledge, data is never allowed to remain raw and mysterious. Attachments, rather than associations, are made between specific points of data to say, "This is the pattern and the pattern tells us such is as it is." At least they leave behind the data for others to study ... oh, if only that were true! Organizations and institutions own the raw data. It's not accessible by just anyone. Credentials or money are required for institutional access. The data is owned so only a few are allowed to make interpretations of the raw data. We don't know if they are the best at interpreting raw data, but that is a story we are sold as true. Science is impregnable, according to capitalist and democratic mythology -- and even though scientists know this isn't true, they don't object because they are gatekeepers and high-powered stakeholders for the most important sets of information in the economic and political world: math, physics, chemistry, biology. They are invested in their own importance within the political, economic, and educational systems throughout the world.
Because of this, phenomenology exists as an "other" related to understanding human experience. This is especially true in English-language countries. Phenomenology barely exists outside of a few academic departments in universities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and possibly even New Zealand. South Africa? I don't know. But because of this outsider status, phenomenology has been able to maintain a degree of "purity" that even the art world hasn't as they, too, are deeply invested in the economic world even if less so the political. Phenomenologists really just exist within the university, though sometimes a legal theory or public policy theory will attach itself to certain ideas within phenomenology, but as dissociated golden nuggets of phenomenological knowledge combined with certain dissociated gold nuggets from biology, psychology, sociology, statistics, contemporary political liberalism, and others. The creativity is fun! But adequate? No.
Is it even possible for a non-dialectic discursivity to arise in a dominantly English-language country? If a country is too deeply embedded within one source of symbolism -- in this case, reason -- as the primary if not entirely exclusive lens through which to create knowledge and meanings from visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, vestibular, and procioreceptive experience, then that country will eventually become detached from actual experience and its people have no idea why they are suffering in the ways they are. Leaving dissociated so many different known variables is not exclusive to reason, but it is central to reason. It passes on to computers associations that could be understood by the individual human mind and certainly a community of minds.
This works within university departments throughout the world. The professionals within the field of neurobiology, for example, may think in relation to ownership and intellectual "teams" as specifically attached university departments they may operate within, but they collaborate with scientists from other universities commonly. Essentially, even. Knowledge has to traverse university borders.
Interdepartmental knowledge, is another issue entirely, though. How does the biology department communicate with the literature department or the history department? Both literature and history incorporate biology into the knowledge content within their fields, but biology does not do the same with other disciplines. It trusts only its own data and resultant knowledge. The sciences, in particular, hold fast to hyper-specialization and the prevention of dilution of their knowledge within their departments. They may give out knowledge, but they won't take it in "as it is in the world," but through isolation of world-content within the framework of biological knowledge. Within literature, biology can have a meaning within politics and art whereas politics and art cannot have life within academic biology (even though biological research is at least in part politically driven).
These oddities of how associations and attachments are seen through different lenses of understanding others and the world shape our lives. Our collective daily confusion and exhaustion are evidence of systemic failures. The particulars are not difficult to spot for one who thinks using more than just reason (logical, moral, etc.) in interpreting and evaluating relationships of all sorts.
Equality, in such ways, is absurd. Do we really want equality or do we want to be acknowledged and allowed to participate in our own lives in all ways that are meaningful within our lives without our efforts necessarily being competitive or combative? Do we want to be able to say with confidence that we will be heard and seriously considered when we say, "I want an MRI and I expect to get one for these reasons"? Do we want to be able to say, "This dwelling and surrounding area is insufficient for my family's needs. There are five of us in two rooms alongside other two-room dwellings filled with between 4 and 12 people. There are no parks or public spaces for us to gather outside these walls. We are becoming physically and emotionally ill. We have ideas of how we can reorganize this geographic space to accommodate our needs. Here are our proposed plans for consideration. We're willing to negotiate, but this is a starting point in our discussions."?
We have to have agency. Phenomenology says so, biology says so, psychology says so. It's only economically and politically that "no" is being said and that is being said with authority through very exclusively empowered institutions. It need not be that way. A political overhaul of societies that allows for participative agency-oriented economics of people taking in the account the fullness of one another's needs is necessary. We have to see each of us including ourselves as meaningful to each other even if through distant association. We have basic understandings of the world from a variety of fields of study of the world that suggest that governments and economics based on 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s views of the world are way off base. A wise people would incorporate new knowledge in ways that provide opportunities for widespread enrichment of quality of life.
Tom Brady knows this. That's why he left the Boston for Tampa, Bill Belichick for Bruce Arians, the the institutionalist nationalism of Patriots for the social anarchy of Buccaneers. It's all in the tea leaves, bruh.
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