And how would you explain it to any outsiders

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3528006&forum_id=2E#32635698)

These new combinations are the very essence of creativity! - two thought structures, built and shaped by reality, mashed together and then chiseled into a new thing by man's critical faculties, as a lapidary works a stone.

And such creativity is the essence of the self! For we are birthed again and again in the recognition of what we have observed and created - including the observation of others observing us. I can say truly that a part of me rests with all of you here on xo - we jointly create this part of reality.

***

It is difficult to describe to outsiders the forms we recognize here, for they have not been acculturated to the xo way. So too you lose a part of yourself when you move away from home, or lose touch with an old friend, or your buddy dies. Worse, the more sharply you ink a self, the steeper the hill those around you must climb to enjoy your company.

We have proceeded, in short, from alienation simpliciter, to the ever-deepening alienation of mutually impenetrable pockets of finely articulated sub-communities.

What is needed is a higher-order lingua franca, a method of relating one community, its memes customs and requisite knowledge, to the next. A community of communities, and a shortest-distance path to onboard those who do not get the joke.

Such is true "integration" - how do we get diverse communities to accommodate such that they become self-similar? Yet integration today is more akin to "how can we destroy the dominant group so that we can take power."

Traditionally, group integration has been motivated by working against a common enemy - for example, the Robbers Cave experiment. Maybe Alan Moore is right - humanity needs an external, existential threat to get them to double slip knot all these hanging communities. Maybe I'll give it to them.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3528006&forum_id=2E#32635956)