Complex II.

I think I've finally reached the spillover point for my current intellectual phase; for years I've convinced myself that it's enough for me to vacuum things into my mind and evaluate them in dialogue with myself rather than venture outside to solicit the opinions of others about the things I think. My internal rhetoric has always been enough for me. I am both egotistical and open about my powers of reasoning, as I find others' opinions perpetually fascinating and worth testing (from which point I may incorporate iterations of them into my repertoire or not) but by nature inferior to my own. I am continually learning--testing and weighing and sampling and piecing together my self from the conglomeration of ideas that exists outside my internal world--but in a more proletarian sense, unless you're interesting, I don't care what you think, and I definitely don't care what you think about what I think.

Though egotistical, my philosophy is egalitarian. My thoughts don't matter to you in the same way yours don't matter to me. Others are rulers of their own internal dialogues and so have no reason to value anything I believe. They will draw their own conclusions from our common source of information and whatever they come away with is as valid as what I construct. I have never understood the need to share information about what one thinks. Though gratifying in a sense--it's nice to have someone listen--if I read a book, listen to a lecture, or attend a class and come away knowing the presented material I can be content in my interpretation and no one else has to be involved. Don't get me wrong; I can defend myself, so if someone manages to compel me into a debate he can prepare to argue, but unless he is factually wrong in his argument I feel no need to let him know I think otherwise. To others I am irrelevant. They shouldn't care about my thoughts; they are fundamentally uninvolved.

But I've become increasingly frustrated at reading and reading and reading and never having an open dialogue in which I can present my ideas--the real ones, the ones that live outside the boundaries that sometimes seem so set in stone. BYU isn't the right forum for those, though it's not because they aren't compatible with the gospel. It's because they're not traditional, and in this culture you grow up learning that nontraditional things must be kept to yourself. Teach the mainstream, keep the eclecticism, right or wrong or otherwise classified. And maybe that's where this whole complex originates. I live an environment in which I have been primed to keep anything remotely interesting inside myself. Is it any wonder I can't make comments in class?