This is my second attempt at describing Jingle Dance. I'm hoping it'll keep the simplicity I tried to go to for in first stab while also being a bit more readable. I expect it will, largely because it won't be scrawled across two notebook pages in a poor imitation of Kropotkin's writing style, but we'll see. Jingle Dance, in its pure form, is a sort of template for conversations or personal thought. To perform Jingle Dance is simple: first, you and whoever you're performing with must decide on a set of baseless and completely unsubstantiable assumptions. In some varieties of the dance, each person will decide on these assumptions individually and not share them with anyone else; in other varieties, participants will start with the same assumptions. Second, you and the other participants must perform great and complex logical calculations, reasoning out grand theorems and intricate conclusions from your initial assumptions. Third - and this is the fun part - you must do everything in your power to map these final conclusions onto the world as you actually experience it. Do not be dissuaded if you find this difficult - by design, it must be impossible, for your conclusions, however clever and complicated, have no basis in reality whatsoever. Finally, when you inevitably fail to apply your unfounded conclusions to the real world, you must all act incredibly surprised, as if the absurdity of this exercise were not known from the outset. It sounds silly. It doesn't even sound fun. And yet, since I first thought about this, I've come to increasingly believe that Jingle Dance describes almost every conversation and moment of reflection I have. I think the easiest example of Jingle Dance that I run into regularly in my everyday life is conversations and contemplation about morality. The problem comes from my nihilism: I simply don't believe any moral principles, such as Good and Evil, really exist in absolute terms. I think that my definition of Good is certainly different from your definition, which is different from somebody else's definition, and nobody can claim to have a more correct definition than anybody else. I don't think there is any absolute goodness, or absolute right and wrong - I think it's a personal standard that exists only in the hearts of individual people. And yet I engage in debates about morality constantly! I will rant and rave about why some political policy is Bad, or why my friend going back to school is the Right thing to do. I find it necessary to think about the world in these terms, even though I don't actually believe they mean anything. The assumption that anything is Good or Evil underlies all my arguments, but, by my nihilism, I believe it's totally baseless. As a result, if I'm ever in conversation with somebody who drills too deep, I get found out: they'll ask some question about the absolute implication of a moral claim I make, and, whoops! I have to pause, "well, no, I don't know if I would say it's ALWAYS true, but, uh, hm, well in this case..." and weasel my way out of the logical inconsistencies I built up during my dance. I've noticed this in my friends and family as well. I'd go so far as to say that when any nihilist, who doesn't believe in an absolute Good and Evil or Right and Wrong, talks about practical morality, that's as Jingle Dance as anything could be. But we must! If we don't we have nothing to talk about. For abstractions build on each other, and the question of morality, which exists close to the lowest level of the abstraction pyramid, is critical to everything above it. Without some notion of Right and Wrong, we cannot claim what is Good or Bad for a person; without claiming what is Good or Bad for a person, we can't say what is Productive or Destructive for a society; and without saying what is Productive or Destructive for a society, we can't say what is Helpful or Unhelpful for our entire world. How can I advocate for one political party over another if I do not have some sense of what is the Right or Wrong way to treat people? And yet I admit that these words, at their core, mean nothing! I have done my oh-so-complex spinning of logic, and arrived at grand conclusions about the future of humanity, the interpersonal dynamics between my friends, and whether I should eat a burger or a salad for lunch, all built on nothing but pixie dust and self-delusion. When the pixie dust is pointed out, when our incompatible baseless assumptions are acknowledged, when somebody says, "well, if we can't agree on that, then there's no point in any of this!" then the conversation dies a little. This is the coda of the dance; it's quickly followed by an anacrusis of the next round. For I have found that only a few moments later someone will shift the focus, or say, "well, anyway, let's assume that..." and the dance will pick up again. The spinning will resume, the debate will continue, and all will gleefully pull the wool back over their own eyes so that they may continue to enjoy the conversation. This is all well and good. At this point, I think I've covered why I believe Jingle Dance describes almost every substantive conversation I have. But the one I find really tricky is the individual case: Jingle Dance, performed by a solo dancer. When I was a little kid, maybe 7 or 8, I had a thought that has stuck with me since. It was morning when I had the thought; I remember sitting at the dining room table. My parents were there, and I was probably getting ready for school or something. All was normal, pleasantly mundane, and then suddenly I wondered: what if, during the night, somebody had swapped me out with a clone, and transferred all my memories to a new body? Worse still, what if somebody had just created me with my memories baked in, created my entire environment, an elaborate set with excellent paid actors, between the time I remembered going to sleep and the time I woke up? I remember becoming very frightened, for as I thought about it more and more, I realized I couldn't for the life of me come up with any single piece of hard and fast evidence to the contrary. I still find it to be a maddening thought. The more you think about it, the more you realize that there really is no way to know that anything you remember, anything outside your immediate perception, is real at all. Plenty of good writers have discussed this. It's basically the plot of the Truman Show. Scott McCloud has a nice sequence about it in Understanding Comics, too. All we actually have evidence for is our current perception, what we're experiencing in the moment. Our belief in anything outside of that is completely baseless. And so we get to a world where Jingle Dance is all. Once you acknowledge, just once, that your memory and senses cannot really be trusted, then any observation you make leveraging what you think you know, any thought you have about something that happened to you, is logical spinning on baseless assumptions as surely as me arguing about morals I don't really believe in is. Even the assumption that our eyes aren't deceiving us at any given moment, or that our ears aren't playing tricks, is baseless. All our thoughts and speakings are built from pixie dust, and as a result can never be anything but cleverly arranged pixie dust themselves. I've had different reactions to this thought before. At first it felt like it might pin me down - how can I go about my day, if I can't be certain about anything? But then, if I can't be certain about anything - here we cut into absurdism - and if everything that ever happens was always going to be - bringing in some of the determinism discussed in the last post - then why shouldn't I just act as if everything is fine? Why not walk around with a lightness, leveraging Jingle Dance when I want to, keeping conversations or thoughts from getting too serious and dire? And finally back to the nihilism: if there is no true Right or Wrong, I have no actual obligation to act in a way that reflects the true nature of the world. I can pick and choose interpretations as I see fit, like putting on a new outfit every morning, and as per Jingle Dance, I have no reason to believe that any is more valid than any other, as all are built on equally unsubstantiable assumptions. And so Jingle Dance, having laid bare all my thoughts and all my conversations, is revealed to be the great liberator. If used correctly, it can be an armor against a seemingly cruel and uncaring universe, if that's something that ever weighs on you as it does me. It justifies any worldview, no matter how optimistic or fantastical. It is the antidote to seriousness, so I have called it something not-so-serious. Having taken time to write it out here, having reckoned with the unknowability of all I experience and believe, Jingle Dance says that I am now free to put it down, forget about it, and go to sleep; I intend to do so immediately.