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stochastiz · 5 months

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i recently came across a scanned image (at this website) of an essay written by Theodore Sturgeon, published June 1967 in Cavalier Magazine, where Sturgeon describes his 'signature mark' and the ethos it represents for him. i decided to transcribe the article for future reference, and figured that people who follow me might also find it insightful and inspiring.

especially when it can be so easy to take something that has been presented as a fact at face value, i think we can always benefit from a reminder to ask the next question.

the symbol being described is an uppercase letter Q with a right-facing arrow striking through it. in my transcription i chose to represent the symbol with (-Q->). check out the scanned image of the essay to see how it was originally printed.

⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄

I give you this symbol. I want you to wear it between your eyeball and your eyelid and look at the world through it. I want to do this, and I want you to do what I say, because you are not the crawling blob in that big bucket of ooze which, down deep, you think you are: you are Mankind. That isn't the best thing in the Universe to be, but it can be. It can be. It will be, if you do what I tell you. All I ask of you is that you hear me out.

Here is the symbol: (-Q->)

What it means is: Ask the next question.

Every advance this species has ever made is the result of someone, somewhere, looking at his world, his neighborhood, his neighbor, his cave, or himself, and asking that next question. Every deadly error this species has committed, every sin against itself and its high destiny, is the result of not asking the next question, or of not listening to those who do ask it.

That next question, (-Q->), is nothing more than a signboard which points toward the truth; the absolute, furthermost irreducible truth. there are not many absolutes, but we know one thing about them all: they are not complicated. More on that later.

First, an example of (-Q->) in action. Let's take something that has filled countless thousands of newspaper inches, in computable hours of argument and temper, a rich crop of injustice and stupidity, and has wasted a great deal more time than it is worth - the pornography question. We'll start with the warcry "we've got to get that filth off the newsstands!"

This is quite enough, in many communities, to gain a majority support right now. "Right-thinking people" gather up their axe-handles and burning torches and rally round what looks to them like the ultimate and self-defining truth. Now we ask that next question:

(-Q->): Why? A: Because it can get into the hands of young people

At this point, for many people, doors close, shutters bang, and all the lights go out inside. But that answer isn't an answer, as you can discover by asking the next question:

(-Q->): What happens if it gets into the hands of young people? A: It might arouse them.

Slam. Bang. Click... but wait. Isn't there another question? Sure!

(-Q->): What happens if they get aroused?

This will probably get you a variety of answers, and you'll forgive me if I don't pursue them in this question-and-answer format, because I haven't much space and I mean to pack it as full as I can. But you get the pattern: every time anyone answers that next question, that (-Q->), see if there isn't another one which can be asked. In this instance you can run the thing down until you find out on the highest scientific (and morally ethical) authority that it doesn't harm anyone to get sexually stimulated with no outlet; that it happens all the time to virtually everyone; that the list of things which stimulate one person or another at various times are by no means limited to what one finds in the girlie books, but include such things as pieces of string, wash on the line, sunsets, music, dogs howling, and a thousand other things, and if you got rid of all that filth you'd find yourself on a desert or in a cell - where, probably, your imagination would do a whole heap worse than any professional pornographer; further, that if the young person is stimulated to find an outlet it is, in a vast majority of cases, masturbation, which does not make green hairs grow in the palms of your hands, which does not cause pimples, and in the case of hyperactive individuals leaves them less likely to commit rape than more - especially if they are free of guilt about it. How do I know all this? By getting my questions answered, and by unfailingly asking that one more. If you do the same, you'll find the references, the carefully performed and documented experiments, the careful analyses and cross-checked conclusions. Let me here caution you never to abandon the (-Q->) technique when it leads you to a conclusion you like. Ask that one more question again, and ask it again... really, the only time you won't be able to ask it will be when you're up against a truth so basic and so simple that the question can't be asked.

And I've never had an answer that was that close to the truth - not ever. But in looking for it I've gotten rid of an awful lot of well-known facts that just ain't so. It makes you very light-hearted, very sure, and rather hard to hurt.

Now about basics and simplicity: complicated and subtle things can be overwhelming and they can change your whole life and the face of the world, but if they are complicated they are not (in the most important sense) important. Now here's a simple basic: living things change. Growth is one of the many kinds of change; what you can be sure of is that anything that has stopped changing has stopped living. Got it?

You are alive. Your family and your town and the county and state and nation are, each in its way, living things. All living things want to feel secure. Human beings are accursed with something that makes most of them, at one time or another in his life, seek security by stopping. He wants things stable and permanent and unchanging, like a pyramid. But there is another kind of stability - dynamic stability - the steadiness of a gull's flight. It's something that cannot happen unless the bird is in motion.

And by and large, friend, gulls outlast pyramids.

This is the kind of conclusion that the (-Q->) process leads you to, and armed with it you can look about you with a kind of Man from Mars astonishment. Living things (nations, cities, towns, families, people) trying to be dead. Trying to stop - stop time, stop change, stop thought, when they could spread their wings and rise it... Listen:

Laws are always late. Usually in the past, and certainly in a faster-and-ever-faster moving future, by the time a law is passed the circumstances which brought it about have already begun to change, which is why so many of them rule us by "the dead hand." As far as I know, no human group has ever tried to establish a whole body of laws with tenure - laws which would expire on a certain date unless the community voted to continue them! How much public apathy do you think you'd find in a democracy like that? Listen:

(-Q->): What is the function of the incest taboo? No - wait - don't give me those answers that "everybody knows," because nobody knows. If you start out on that recessive defective gene bit, with the idiot children of first cousins and all that, I'll only refer you to animal breeders the world over, and hope you enjoyed those idiot pork chops last night, and have fun with the loot you picked up at the $2 window, courtesy of the dark horse who paid 83 to 1 and who is the result of a dozen generations of inbreeding. Men are different from hogs and horses - but biologically they are not all that different. Listen:

Olaf Stapledon, bless his memory, wrote a book called Last and First Men which traces the history of Man through the next couple of hundred billion years. He speaks of something similar to what I call the (-Q->) process, and calls it "the precious insight." Through the generations, he says, it appears repeatedly and is repeatedly struck down by accidents large or small (well, we can't do much about that) "or," he says, "by an access of racial imbecility, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dares not look down the precipice of the fact."

I think we are in such a period of "racial imbecility" as he describes. I think that there are a few people around - you, for example - who can cure it because they are not afraid to look down the precipice of the fact, no matter how deep the pit, no matter how different.

All I ask of you is that you look at what is there, and ask that next question. In exchange I offer more than those who claim that this act idea, or that, will save this species from extinction. I offer this species its maturity and triumph.

I just heard a voice from one of you:

(-Q->): Just who the hell do you think you are? A: That's it. Don't stop there.

-- TheodoreSturgeon, 1967

#more emphasis: i didn't write this #please let me know if there are any transcription errors!#i just really wanted to transcribe it to personally draw from later and figured i might as well share it with anyone who might be intereste #it also started me down a bit of a rabbit hole about who theodore sturgeon was and i've found some pretty cool stuff #plus i always find it fascinating when something 'from so long ago' is so incredibly relevant to current affairs and this essay definitely #falls into that category #theodore sturgeon #ask the next question #media literacy #critical thinking #essay #stochastic ramblings #long post

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