If I Can't Find A Meaning To This Fearful Life, I'll Become The Enemy Of Mankind

It is not existence itself (in the sense of conscious experience) that is the malign ulcer I seek to identify here. It is human nature, even extensive to our deficient social institutions, that are to be taken as enemy. In the face of it, our propping up of such failed experiments are representative of certain inconvenient facts about the human condition. It's not like these factors are not entirely insurmountable; we have some resources to deal with them. However, there are certain lessons to be drawn, in the abstract, from their far-reaching effects. What could be perhaps our saving grace is the fact that consciousness is completely schizoid to the inanimate universe; it's entirely unpredictable from the point of view of just brains or otherwise the third-person "perspective". For example, the functional role of pain is signaling threats and other such measures — it's not predictable or physically necessary for there to be a subject "on the inside" to be experiencing that pain in all of its quality. So what I am trying to say with this is that, while much content of our experiences are horrible; per events in the universe; the overall form of it remains pure. And the best you can do is use your freewill to shape the contents of your experience to be more optimal. To wallow in some dysfunctional surrender to cosmic forces is wasteful. To forge some caricature of value, in any project you wish, is the best one can hope to achieve in this life. With the ever accelerating expanse of technology, such endeavors are becoming more fruitful, more plausible.

The fact that we didn't consent to the backdrop of our situation, and even the situation itself, doesn't mean that we bear no responsibility for certain action-content that we output in the midst of it. For example, I can be forcefully thrown into some dilemma by a gang of swine who kidnap me and make me part of some sick social experiment. So let's say I am woken up, the plastic bag is ripped off of my head, and in my immediate environment I see a wailing baby with a bomb strapped to it's little chest. I go to get up and loosen my bonds, when I hear "tick!" — I myself have a bomb strapped to my chest. It is then explained to me through some prerecorded film playing on the TV on the other side of the room that, if I leave on the door to the left, the bomb on my chest will be rigged to go off in 15 seconds. If I go through the door on the right, then I am able to go free, but the bomb on the baby will be rigged to explode instead. Do I say, "I didn't consent to this. I didn't rig me and this kid up with bombs," and then proceed with, "but I am still held responsible for refusing to accommodate for the baby? " No! I bear the strain of full responsibility for absolutely everything I choose to do — a fact that persists whatever my environment or selection of possible choices happens to be. I even hurdle some responsibility for subconscious actions and for continual psychological states that are usually *direct* control, for I voluntarily sustain them as part of my being; that they are mostly the result of my past actions that I had direct control over is quite evident. I am not saying that we have some moral obligation to appease all standards and perceived obligations; that is certainly not the case. In fact, I loathe people people for being authoritarian ******** who shower all these arbitrary social expectations on us.

Death is but the second resort one should choose when their ability has been severely restricted. And I am not talking about the self-enforcing psychological schemes that people lock themselves into; mental states have a certain efficacy that people underestimate. They are all too eager to draw the causal line only to external forces. Introspection is an invaluable tool that is subject to misuse and abuse, hence its undeserved negative reputation. We seem to have an almost perfect introspective awareness, but just with this tendency to adopt many erroneous introspective beliefs. It's a wonder that the entire basis of modern psychology is also the cognitive faculty with which they deliver the bulk of their scorn and ridicule.

Life is not some grand endeavor, it is not inherently special, and it certainly is some an absolute end in of itself. It's but a defective medium with which the will can express itself. For the purposes of expressing itself through meaningful actions, I think some of the bullshit and horrors we experience are worth enduring. At the same time, it's hard to not look at us denizens in the first-world contemplating apparent hardships of a relatively privileged civilization — real suffering can be found in the horrors of third-world environments; and in the malicious schemes of history. Yet in recognizing this fact we might just just be lowering our standards; constraining ourselves to settle for decay. If we but relinquish our resources to the weight of such easy complacency; to just facilitate generations of docile drones that sheepishly accept existential debasement; then we will have already lost. For this, such comparisons in relativity should be drawn with great care.