Our Inability to Cognize Distance and the Alienation Thereby Caused (unfinished)

In an age in which various paradigms and enclosed "communities" are becoming increasingly overlapped, self-referential, and simultaneously contradictory, the only true reconciliation of concepts, notions, or ideas is to be found within the intellect. Even the intellect serves as its own part of a larger "community" of ideas. It is unclear whether the building-blocks of this "community" are the ideas themselves or the individuals themselves, but the two are inextricably linked anyhow and thus perhaps this question is not so important. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the individual to do anything outside of a context, and yet the individual's ability to understand exactly what that context consists of is virtually impossible.

A geographical location cannot be considered, in itself, a context. Most individuals exist simultaneously in multiple locales: That is, most of us have networks of friends and, in fact, lives in multiple places at once. They cannot be separated in concept, for they share the individual as a link between them, and that which the individual undertakes in one is directly influenced by that which he previously undertakes in another. Furthermore, the concept of distance and location is becoming more and more impossible to gauge, due to the fact that we are able to travel in ways that take away from us the ability to truly understand what distance itself means. When an individual runs, he is aware of the amount of effort required to get from point A to point B, and in this way the act of running is a physical connection between the individual himself and the distance itself. When an individual drives in a car, this connection is somewhat obscured; and when an individual is a passenger in a car it is even more-so obscured, and so on. There is less physical connection between distance (that is, space) and the self; and because the human being is not able to move, on his own, as quickly as a vehicle, he has a hard time understanding the vastness of the space over which he passes. The only cue he really has that made aid in the indication of such is the visual cue of the land passing by outside of the window, and even this is potentially deceptive because it utilizes one sense and one sense only.

Airplane travel aids in furthering the detachment of the self to the concept of space and distance, for the individual can in no way fathom the distance that he crosses in a plane: Not by visual cues, for the land moves so slowly below him that he cannot even have the slightest understand of the speed at which he travels; and certainly not by physical cues, such as necessary exertion of energies required to get from point A to point B (as with an indivual who takes it upon himself to walk or run across said distance). The only quantification that the distance covered in a plane has is that of money, and even this is contorted because there is not a direct relationship between distance-traveled and money-spent, although the distance does factor into th equation to varying degrees for various destinations. Yet so many other factors are at play in this kind of a situation that the individual cannot gauge or judge distance by this, either. He is given no choice but to place his trust in the hands of a larger system, that of geography as depicted by maps and numbers of miles. This leads to a feeling of submission to something larger that cannot be understood, and the result is that this process is alienating.

Other examples of realms that are becoming increasingly difficult to attribute any kind of boundaries to include realms such as that of morality, time, gender, race, and age.

The only apparent solution to this alienation, and this systematic removal of points of attachment onto which the individual can anchor his self-hood, seems to be the act of affirming the self within the self, and also with other selves, simultaneously taking into account subjectivity and objectivity. The act of searching for differences between one self and another is only a step toward further attempting to categorize the self in any number of groups or categories that do not seem to be categorical or definable at all. The largest downfall that the self may be subject to occurs when he makes repeated attempts to define himself by way of a group in which he sees himself as a member. This concept of being a member of anything smaller than humanity at large is illusory, and yet the act of attempting to do this is one of the most common phenomena of our present time. Even the concept of individualization seems to present itself as encouragement of group-mentality, for many so-called "individuals" view themselves as such just because they spend the majority of their time with other so-called "individuals", and in this way they are not individuals in the individualist sense at all because they define themselves by way of association with others.