It doesn't follow anything. :-) Just for fun, what exactly *is* a non-sequitur? We all know how the term is used here on FFL -- as an epithet to mean, "You didn't follow my logic, and went off in another direction other than the one I *wanted* you to go in." It's a control freak thang.
I don't know about you guys, but this morning I'm having fun pondering the whole concept of the non-sequitur. I remember seeing Marshall McLuhan talk about non-sequiturs once, very cogently. He referred to them as a product of a culture (Western) that is (using James Joyce's phrase) "ABCED-minded." That is, he believed (and was joined in that belief by Joseph Campbell), that what most Westerners thought of as 'logical' or 'rational' was to some extent dictated to them by having been brought up in a culture that has a sequential alphabet and a fixed word order in their sentence structure. That linguistic structure, imposed upon their thought structure over time, tempts them to believe that nature is equally sequential and fixed. But all the scholars above pointed out that if you look at cultures with a pictographic (non-sequential) alpha- bet like China and Japan, you find completely different concepts of what is 'logical' or 'rational.' Similarly, if you look at the philosophy that came from Slavic languages (which have no fixed word order), you find different concepts of 'logical' or 'rational,' even in a culture that expresses itself using an alphabetic language. Me, I don't know. All I know is that for me, the most interesting exchanges on Fairfield Life are the ones in which one person says something, clearly expecting other posters to respond to it in the fixed, rigid, limited way that they're "supposed" to respond to it, and the respondant doesn't "play along." Instead, the respondant takes the idea and does a Monty Python number on its head, saying essentially, "And now for something completely different..." This, to me, indicates a certain *freedom* of thought that one does not see in those who cry "Non-sequitur!" when this happens. Those individuals clearly *wanted* the conversation to go in a certain ABCED-minded direction, and the self that wanted this is *attached* to the conversation actually going in that direction. If it does, the self has nothing new to learn, and thus is SAFE. So the self rebels against those who won't "follow" its lead, and screams "Non-sequitur!" Meanwhile, those whose minds have moved on to more interesting trains of thought, trains that have "jumped the tracks" that the original poster was trying to lay down, are in most cases having more FUN with their conversations. So what do you guys think about "non-sequiturs?" You can take this thread anywhere you want to. *Nothing* you say within it will be considered a non-sequitur, or not following the topic.
