The Challenges of Being a Soldier

"**The Challenges of Being a Solider'** is an open letter penned by American rapper Lupe Fiasco. He posted it to his Instagram account on January 3, 2017, in two parts.

## Part 1

The Soulja Boy Challenge

Conflict is a product of humans natural relationship to the material world. The validity of conflict is affirmed by this single fact alone and needs no higher theory. Humans in their habit of procuring things inevitably develop a complex of simple protection and maintenance of the things we collect. Because all of the physical things we collect are the direct product of some form of physical labor exercised by ourselves or by others on our behalf, this development of a system to protect and maintain these items as way of honoring that labor is sensible and consistent with reality. Our minds, the seat of our internal world, is not immune to this same process. As we traverse through life we accumulate and refine deep emotional configurations and conceptual models based on the physical products we attain. We find reinforcement of these mental models in our peer groups and society at large which rewards certain mental models and penalizes others. These models are not static and localized to one state of the mind. They are dynamic complexes spread out across all the regions of the brain, from the primal subconscious to the real time visual cortices, and their expression is just as dynamic and environment sensitive. The hard physical products of the outer material world download their non-physical emotional software into the inner world of our mind. This cognitive "download" informs our behavior which we express back into the physical outer world as language, work, play etc. We protect these non-physical products just as we protect the physical products that we collect. Our notions, thoughts and concepts are just as precious to us as our material goods. A person impinging on our ego or tastes in even the most simplest and benign of circumstances can trigger the defense/attack mechanism which sets into motion a series of operations in the mind some of which we can control and some of which were never meant to be controlled and some of which are a hybrid.

## Part 2

The more a person is in possession of the Long Knowledge of his or her conceptual space the more he or she will be able to govern these mechanisms appropriately. For the most part man manages this pretty consistently as a fact that most of the world is indeed not in conflict. This is not to belittle places on the planet where physical conflict is indeed occurring in a redundant and protracted manner but to establish that most people lead mostly conflict free lives. The key word is "mostly" as some scale of conflict is present in all the lives of humans. Serial conflict in an individual is a sign of the lack of a firm grasp on the managerial levers of the mind. For celebrities of some wealth this is exacerbated by visibility which puts more eyes on the products they possess. This leads to the building of no less than a mental fortress complex so massive that one mind cannot possibly maintain and manage all of its defense/attack aspects properly. This overcompensation leads not to strength but to fragility, not to agile resilience but to ineffective redundancy. All things become threat. Cracks, large only because the protective wall has been built so large, are noticed and exploited by the wolves. Adding to this is that the nature to collect things has not been muted. Products and things are still being chased after and attained leading to more eyes and yet more wolves and more walls and yet more cracks. All humans are susceptible to this frenzy and we all spectate and speculate in anticipation of the outcome. Maybe to inform the construction of our own grand fortress or to mimic tactics for the wolf we wish to someday be. The true challenge is to dissolve conflict at the root not to elevate it into social coolness through comedic mockery and provocative gossip.

To those who care to understand...

## References

1. ↑ "Lupe Fiasco (@lupefiasco)". *Instagram*. January 3, 2017.
2. ↑ "Lupe Fiasco (@lupefiasco)". *Instagram*. January 3, 2017.