I’ve recently been thinking a lot about self-destruction.
I’ve been thinking about how passion and destruction are interlinked. I’ve also thought that for creation to exist, destruction must proceed it.
I’ve had quite the difficulty to try and make sense of these feelings. I thought I’d try to explain and explore this idea with other people.
So here I am - Let’s start from the premise above.
You’re gonna have to start by pinning down terminology a bit.
Change is a term often used which I think most people would feel is a usefully distinct word for example if I said: said:
I think those would mean something different to most people despite all reductively applying to the literal rearrangement of a pile of sand.
So the obvious potential confusion here is in the case where I changed a sandcastle how would you decribe it? adding a turret could be taken as destroying the old one and creating a new one but it seems strange to me to argue for the throwing out of change as a concept since what I did seems meaningfully different from smashing a sandcastle, walking 100 meters, and building a new one.
So could you elaborate on what you take creation and destruction to entail?
I think all 3 are examples of destruction and creation. I think destruction often has a negative connotation. I think this is why we like to use the word “change” : to describe both destruction and creation at the same time.
Destruction entails that what existed no longer does. Creation entails creating something that didn’t exist.
Ok so we can take that stance. I would disagree that these are useful semantics because of the case I mentioned where I feel like adding a turret to a sandcaste is something meaningfully distinct from reducing a sandcastle to a pile of sand, walking 100 meters down the beach, and making a new one with the turret.
Do you disagree that this is meaningfully distinct? If you do would you feel that it’s equivalent to do those two things? That you feel the same way about them?
If you agree that it’s meaningfully distinct then why insist on framing it in the same concepts instead of using the concept of change?
I guess to some level, this is the ship of Theseus problem. At what point is it still the same sandcastle?
I guess my theory of destruction assumes that for something so small - the addition of a turret seems to change the nature of the sandcastle. For example, in my mind, a sandcastle is simply an old medieval house for the aristocracy. If you add a turret, it no longer seems like a simple house - it gives new meaning to the castle.
I think people certainly use it in distinctive ways but I think that framing it as destruction and creation makes people understand that to build something new, we must first abolish and deconstruct the old. I think the origin of my theory is harder to apply to a general context because of that.
For example, let’s say that we have a big friend group or some kind of self-governing body and we want to make it more diverse and inclusive. The first steps would be to deconstruct why the existing structure is pushing people away and once we’ve found why (say, people use slurs or regularly make “racist jokes”) then we have to destroy the ideas that made these behaviours socially acceptable. Only then can we build something anew.