I love this post so much.

I also suspect that persuasion lies somewhere on the spectrum between “total avoidance” and “total domination” just as violence, fraud, etc. do. And I love the rejection of “human nature essentialism” — the whole point of being human, in my mind, is that WE get to decide what our nature is because WE get to decide what right and wrong are in the first place. I think this whole idea of civilization is the mutual adoption of arbitrary abstractions as a means for tying ourselves to one another in more and more meaningful ways, in many sense the creation of a collective hallucination or dream. My goal is not to destroy the dream, but to make it more lucid, participatory, since it depends on everybody’s consent on some level.