The Penguin and the Projection, The Puritan and the Project.

Preamble: The Penguin of Incoherence and the Purgatory of Interpretation

i wrote this article in reflection of the state of cognitive dissonance that i found in an individual encounter - as it happened - the thoughts in this article were not born in an isolated vacuum; in the world something similar was taking place in social media at large. The culmination of my thoughts in this article was prompted by the visceral encounter of the "chaos" of our collective interpretations, which sealed the ending of my reflection from the individual encounter of a cognitively dissonant individual. In Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, there is a sequence involving a "deranged" penguin which turns away from the sea and the huddle  - for reasons no scientist can truly fathom decisively as its masquerade of authority melts in the face of questions on its uncertainty - marching toward the vast, frozen interior of the continent, its fate uncertain. Yet viewers largely assume it waddled to certain death. Indeed that is the only thing for which we have certainty.

This will be a long primer to the key point of my article itself as the gloriously all-at-once unexplained and tragic movement of life in nature justifiably deserves its own place, which will provide an anchor from which all my observations connect (and stems) from. This is to prevent an epistemic bypass or trespass - as i am discussing not merely science, or faith, or philosophy, or psychology - but all in its intricately complicated abstract of layers that we find, the complexities of the human being. The core matter it serves is to unpack the bandwagon of reactions in cognitive dissonance after all.

To begin with, let's see a snapshot of the observation offered by Rotten Tomatoes: 
"Encounters at the End of the World offers a poignant study of the human psyche amid haunting landscapes."

Quoting a post by @ultimatefacts199; in human, yet salient, all-too-human reckoning, reality is often not seen plainly:

• Sometimes you are not being brave.

• Sometimes you are not being different.

• Sometimes you are simply ... lost.

Quoting @theartistfix; in stark sobriety and presence, he names the video as what I simply call a Rorschach test for all of humanity:

"I don't think the video is about a penguin.

I think it's a mirror test.

What you see in this story depends entirely on where you are in your own walk."

In the analytical/reflective posts and comment sections full of opinion gold (or one may take as fool's gold), digitally enshrined in posts reaching views in the millions, one sees a spectrum of different interpretations coming from across varying standpoints, that when strung together and looked at as a whole gestalt, points to a philosophical Gap of Incoherence - which i mentioned in another article - in modern western secular thinking in its full, modern, fractured bloom, where feelings and thoughts, logic and emotion, facts and opinions finds itself in humorous cognitive tension, turning the penguin into a meme of human irony. In contrast with interpreting the event methodically or critically, the "Individual", of various western secular thoughts, immediately begins an affair of the outward against or over the inward, and the same for the converse.

They project. They romanticise the penguin's terminal disorientation as "bravery" or "independence", or "burnout" or "alienation". They see their own inner world mirrored in the bird's isolation and call it "sadness", "bravery", "beauty", "loneliness", "heart-rending", and some are aware of the projections of their opinions and some are not. It formed a spectrum of opinion across levels of awareness. But arguably both ends came from the tension held within themselves between function and frustration within the modern capitalistic world, as we would notice once we examine the other side of the coin.

Meanwhile, scientific minds of the priesthood class within what i would name Cannibal Capitalism, raised the sacrifical altar of science offering a surgeon's blade in counter-argument against projecting their all-too-human emotions and simply pointed out what they consider malfunction of the internal navigation system of the Penguin, from an inference over various facts "connecting the dots" to reach a most plausible explanation. It is not immediately observable, but theories and interpretations arise out of each fact combined with another to offer a reasonable explanation. Although how each proof correlates or interrelates with another is not immediately clarified, even though the relation of one fact to another may obviate or attenuate, or reinforce or disprove, each of the individual facts' implied conclusions in various positive or negative way, what the scientists posits simply sits on Occam's Razor - choose the simplest assumption, that is usually the most correct. Although in history this has been disproved and shown to be far from the case, since science continually evolves and calls that a feature instead of admitting that it is never able to assert its own truth as universal and therefore avoiding the fact that it has always been used, both personally and politically, to assert a theory or opinion from the ego.

Each side attempts to describe what is essentially themselves and their various beliefs and perceptions in contrast and sometimes negation of the "other". 

On a grand level of humour this was an ultimate parody of "why did the chicken cross the road" but "why did Penguin walk the snow", and within seconds, millions of answers and interpretations can come forth. It was interesting to note that, poeticised or romanticised as it is, in so much of humanely inspired fullness, a kind of grand embodiment of life and artful expression crossing streams emerged.

Art imitates life, so to speak, but in the grandest and ultimate sense, I say, Art embodies life. Art in a certain true sense, in an artist's attempts to express, or maybe even embody, qualities of life and conscious experience. Even if it may be dark or macabre; so long as it is honest and sincere, it is serious art, to quote Pound. In this case, the canvas is the Internet itself, and the materials of the medium are the comments of people and that Penguin and its footprints in the frozen sands of its desert of ice. All before its footprints disappeared, man chased and immortalised its own state today in history for us to examine and study. I wonder what tomorrow will hold as we look back, and the story is still developing.

But as it is, the social media networks are displaying in many instances ways how humans in the world desperately projects their own interpretations in a digital cacophony where one opinion and interpretation tries to win over the other. One remarkable "loud" label applied here in this example even sounds exactly as it means to be : "Nihilistic Penguin", even "Absurd".

Instead of comfortably, amicably standing in one camp or the other, each one attempts to loudly proclaim its own party principles (i'm looking at Nietzsche's quote) as it stands in its own ideals of an "other" within themselves and anxious attaches to anyone remotely or closely resembling that ideal, in contrast to forcefully, aggressively decrying, disconnecting from everyone else who are seemingly opposite of their ideals. Some comments are remarkably hilarious or ridiculous, almost like a decrying of both sides, apostate in some sense, disengagement from chaos in another. The winners in my eyes are those who just let the Penguin video be, because the video was from 15 years ago and nobody remembered it, it was not relevant before, and it hasn't changed. But we did. "Back then, it only raised curiosity", a simple "eh". Today it triggered recognition." (quoting a comment from social media which i can no longer find). This was a calm and sober recognition which did not need to attack and throw labels onto anything except a self-aware recognition of oneself without projection.

The Mirror of Internal Avoidance: The Psychological Chiasmus of the Fracture

This "lostness" is the symptomatic result of the Anxious-Avoidant chiasmus. The netizens who romanticise the penguin are often the outwardly anxious; they seek to find an "ideal" in the bird’s "otherness" to avoid the internal avoidance of their own groundless reality. They project their broken "Syncognition" onto a creature that is simply malfunctioning, because they themselves are malfunctioning.

As we discussed, this dynamic is not merely a "style" of attachment, but a manifestation of the internal fracture. We must recognise that:

One who is outwardly anxious in attachment is, in truth, inwardly avoidant. They reach for the "other" (or the romanticised image of a penguin) to avoid facing the vacuum within their own stymied heart.

One who is outwardly avoidant in attachment is, in truth, inwardly anxious. They maintain a distance of "selective scepticism" to guard against the overwhelming chaos of a feeling they cannot think through.

In the commentaries, the "Avoidant" criticises the "Anxious" for being sentimental, while the "Anxious" accuses the "Avoidant" of being cold. Both are right, and both are fundamentally wrong. They are both projecting their own "puritanistic shadows" onto a scene that requires organic cognition—the ability to see the "elephant" (or the penguin) from trunk to tail, rather than through the narrow lens of one's own fragmented wounds.

The "New Religion of Man" in Interpretation

This is where the biopolitical meets the psychological. Our secular conditioning has taught us to prize "self-expression" (the outward) over "self-reconciliation" (the inward). We are encouraged to "feel our way" through nature or "think our way" through emotions, but never to integrate the two.

The result is a form of Mimetic Dogmatism. We see a penguin "breaking the rules," and because we are avoidant of our own internal rules, we deify its "rebellion." We treat its madness as a "secular liturgy" of the individual spirit. We are so desperate to avoid the "moral humiliation" of being "simply lost" that we manufacture a narrative of "being different."