Confronting Death While Affirming Life

Now more than ever human beings are being confronted with a world which seems to be perched on the edge of chaos. Tens of thousands of people are dying of a deadly respiratory infection; the economy is in shambles, and is likely to get worse. Donald Trump is in power and the people around him seem giddy at the thought of facilitating greater levels of chaos. All the while this happens, more and more power is being transferred from the middle classes to the upper classes, ensuring that there will be a time of reckoning, a social confrontation, between the powers-that-be and the vast majority of the population.

Still, we're being seduced by the promise of recovery. Despite the fact that social and economic trends over the last 40 years gave been leading to greater individualization and egotization of the population, and peoples lifestyles have become more and more insecure, and the planets homeostasis is being put in greater and greater peril by the continued release of CO2, deforestation, mass industrial farming, and other forms of pollution that is leaving this planet on the road to greater despoliation. Soon, but not quite yet, just as in cancer or any other disease which eventually emerges,, we are being lulled by the little space of security that still exists. Internet still works; we can buy groceries - or at least the majority of us can; we can go on Netflix; we can turn to institutions that are still working. All of this leaves us feeling like the sky is not falling, but most assuredly, it is - at least metaphorically. Our lives are about to get far more insecure than they already are, and as I suspect was the unconscious intention, the year 2020 may be recognized by our progeny as the year when the past became more clear, when our behavior indicated its consequences. In other words, hindsight really is 2020.

Knowing Death

So much of a humans existence has to do with feeling like things aren't right. When Prometheus stole the fire from the Gods, or disobeyed Zeus, the overlooked or untold portion of the myth is, "what motivated Prometheus to do such a thing"? Prometheus no more knows than the humans who repeated this myth. Before Prometheus, the disobedient, immortal, there was simply one world - one being. Prometheus stole some sort of fire - and gave it to humanity, after first creating humanity. After the creation of man, Prometheus was condemned by the gods to suffer his liver being eaten by a vulture every night. His life force, in other words, was polluted; his liver - the cite which cleans the bodies energy (its blood), was polluted by Prometheus' polluted fantasy that he could "outdo" the coherency of the logic of reality. Again - how could a place within the structure of reality - a mind like Prometheus - ever imagine itself to have incarnated such a position, or motivation, that wasn't generated by reality itself? For the Gnostics, myth and fantasy and sheer unreality had to fill in the gaps to quiet their undoubtedly morbid fears of behaving in a frankly insane manner. The the true Satanist, logic must be thrown out the window; metaphysics must die; thought must cease. The gnostics got carried away and thought they could think there way out by imagining a reality beyond reality, which explained their motivation to escape reality. But the simple truth is, the system suffices to explain why things are the way they are.

Prometheus' despoiled life force, his nightly anxieties and his need to keep the demons at bay, also had its own redeeming fantasy: that one day Hercules, the ubermensch, would come to the rescue and free Prometheus, the self-aware disobedient immortal, from the chains he himself has played a part in creating.

This myth of course is philosophy; the myth is describing an oral tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation, as all myths come with oral traditions, so too this one: Prometheus is the self-aware human; Zeus is the fundamental order of reality; man is the creation of those elites who've created, or fashioned, the personalities we all embody; and the vultures are the consequence that the self-aware human is aware that he creates for himself by going-against-the-grain-of-reality. Hercules is the project of history, of technology, of the belief that "man" can outdo the cosmos. The tragic, woeful truth, however, is that science does not support any of the fantasies of transhumanism. Theoretical biology is the thorn in transhumanism' side; epigenetics complicates the essentialist fantasies of geneticists. The presence of the objects around us force us to question our own sanity - the wild, unconstrained belief that a structured created by surrounding structures can perfect its own biodynamical structure without taking account of it. Our minds depend on the arrangements of particles, atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, organs, and bodies, as they correlate their activities to objects and events around them. Our technology looks pitiful compared to this profound complexity. The very fact that our biosphere is on the edge of chaos and on the verge of collapsing, while we remain, as an understatement, light years away from having the insight required to "hack" the body and overcome death - as the megalomaniacal fantasies of Ray Kurzweil - is it not obvious that this hubris is the kernel of the fall that awaits us?

What motivates this tragedy? This suicidal march to the abyss? Why is the western world so intensely prideful, and therefore, so infatuated with the inevitable result that it invites? Why is the culture so enamoured with death? You can't have the unreasonable idealization - the comedy of thoughtless becoming - without its opposite, tragedy, suffering, and loss. What a monstrous philosophy the Greeks have left us - illusion and suffering! Again and again we pass through this circle, and every time we bring ourselves a little bit closer to the final countdown. One more illusion perhaps? Maybe we can go to space? Maybe we can, like in interstellar, be benevolently guided to a wormhole and led to a new Earth? Or maybe not.

Or maybe this time we will feel the full brunt of realities forcefulness. Maybe this time we have to shave back on our ideals, and finally, face reality. But to do so, we need a little less nihilism than the west is used to. Pride with suffering, apparently, is more tolerable than just suffering. Take away the pride, take away the goodies that accrue to elites, and reality just becomes painful, nightmarish, but not, we must remind ourselves, because this is what it inherently is. We can choose life; we can be, as those wise Jews advise, speakers of "L'Chaim!"; but that would just hit at the pride of the west, wouldn't it? The west would rather die - and kill the rest of the world with it - than let those damn God-lovers get their way.

Life and Death

Life and Death are two parts of a singular process. One affirms symmetry and leads us towards greater symmetry by having us guide and direct our minds towards clearer and clear understandings of our interpersonal relations. Life never achieves clear and perfect symmetry, as the world around us maintains a modicum of unpredictability; after all, how did we fall from Eden? Was it not the facts of nature, of regular, though non-linear, systematic changes in our planets geovolcanism, which led to a supervolcanic eruption which changed our planets ecology, which changed us along with that ecology, which led to the Nephilim - the giants, or egotistical elites, which preyed on others?

Our universe is the ultimate boss, and we just have to face up to this. No part of us lies outside its force. Every bit of us is in this universe, in the mind or soul of God, so there is no soul in our body - but the reverse. We and what we are the perfect result of processes and structures that shape our perceptual and cognitive processes; spirits come in and out; and yes, they are spirits of the One God. We enact the consequences of this dynamic, but we are not without choice. We can be pushed to the precipice, to utter exhaustion, and come to find ourselves willing to change: that life is better than death; that existing according to natures limits is better than condemning ourselves and those who've chosen differently, to death. Woe to the person who wishes death on an other who chooses life. They have utterly over-stepped their boundaries; they have taken their own decision and attempted to generalize to other people. This exposes the vapidity and treacherousness of those who prioritize liberty over responsibility; it is only their own liberty they care for; not others. They care not for the logic of complementarity - that liberty entails responsibility, and vice versa.

For death, indeed, is a mystery. We are responsible to the mysteries that await us - mysteries that are probably implied by the structure of the real we exist within. Some hyper-dimensional reality probably awaits us, which includes all that we are and more; the universe and all it contains. Life is the place of liberty, but it is death - and suffering - which forces us to be responsible. I cannot care, and tell myself that is because life isn't real, or necessary, but such a position is the worse form of self-trickery. You ignore those affordances which make your choice what it is; there is some comfort that derives from life which makes your decision what it is. To say that life is nothing, to say that proper nutrition doesn't make life better, or loving, caring faces doesn't make life better, or laughter, or fun, or a healthy environment - to deny how life is enriched by this, by music, by dance, by care - by following the golden rule to the T: to the point of understanding and accepting that you only know rightly when you take into account the specific, unique context that has shaped that persons existence, and if you we're them, what would you want? This is such a simple, easy truth, but our greediness and materialism makes us stubbornly unresponsive to its goodness.

a reply to: Astrocyte

ensuring that there will be a time of reckoning, a social confrontation, between the powers-that-be and the vast majority of the population.