Category Archive: Uncategorized

While trawling through the interwebs sometimes I come across an article which provokes a strong reaction in me. Most of the time spent on the internet, let's face it, is a complete waste but sometimes one is made to think a bit. I came across an article where one Mr. Sam who has just turned 30 tries to give life advice based upon his experience during the last decade. Most of it is pretty generic stuff (Life's not a dress rehearsal, pick the right thing to do, have parties) which is precisely the kind of lowest common denominator babble that an average person who has just turned 30 is expected to say. The tone of such a person is always very optimistic and life to him/her would always be just right if one followed this, this, and this step. It doesn't take a rocket scientists (or maybe it does...) to see how much of a load of crap such an attitude is because obviously we would fix things if we could and the reason that we often cannot is because our goals often conflict with each other and we tend to have a very poor understanding of where the conflict is coming from and how to resolve it. Simplistic and optimistic points of views are only for rank idiots and absolute geniuses. I am neither so I have to think. It made me think of what would I say if I had to give advice. After all I also turned 30 a couple of years ago and why should Mr. Sam have all the fun? But advice can never be divorced from context so I'll talk about the context first.

My personal experience of the world around me has been one of responding less and less to its stimuli as time has passed. In a sense I accept it more than I used to and I see less and less reason to change anything about it. There is an inevitability to it and it's neither a cause for optimism nor pessimism, neither happiness nor sorrow. It just is. My outlook towards the world is fatalistic then but the outlook itself personally fills me neither with hope nor with hopelessness. I have the experience of looking at it and at myself from a detached point of view, of appreciating all that is constantly in flux about the world and all that is ephemeral about myself. The result is an attitude where things need not be taken very seriously, for the most part at least. There is not much to be wished because one needs to be careful about what one wishes, both for oneself and for others. There is no need to find coherence in oneself either because there exists none. In fact, I have a distinct feeling that most of our issues result from trying to resist the incredible forces of life whose inevitability we appreciate so little. And this inevitability invariably includes, as a necessity, different cross-sections of people with different views towards life, often conflicting with each other. And they will look down upon each other and they will try to impose their own views on others. Sometimes they will also be sympathetic to each other and help those out who are considerably worse off than them. And the same people would often harbor hateful feelings which would make them feel bad about themselves because they are supposed to be, oh so nice. All very amusing of course. Amusement then is my central response to the human condition, almost all of the time. There are times when I feel contemptuous of others and I don't try to correct it, not seeing it as a defect but as a trait which is necessarily human. And then there are times when I feel sympathetic to others and try to help them but I don't feel proud for doing so either. Secondary emotions, especially emotions which make people feel good like respect and pride are utterly incomprehensible to me. Most of the time they are distinct signs of pettiness and I try not to put up with those who appear proud or respectful or unnecessarily complex in other ways. My short time here on Earth is too precious to bother with such people whose cardinal fault is taking themselves and others too seriously.

So with this context if I were to give advice what shall it be? I'll first have to preface it with the statement that a 32 year old need never be taken seriously. In fact, most people, if not all people, need never be taken seriously when it comes to them giving advice on issues of most importance. Most people have absolutely no understanding of the whirlwind they are in and are, in any case, too insecure to admit to their own deep follies and the pointlessness of their own lives. I may fall in the first category but I don't think I fall in the second one. I think it'd be healthy for an individual to take themselves and others less seriously and to try to find amusement in the intricate brilliance that is this world. There are more issues than one can solve and one need not feel bad about those which are too difficult. To accept this life and this world in all its imperfections, to realize that one is limited, and to try to make peace with their own flawed selves since it won't last for very long in any case, in the grand scheme I mean. I also think that this is an optimistic view of life to someone who chooses to see it in such a light. And I think I do.

Following is a very interesting passage from Berlin's book on liberty where he talks about John Stuart Mill and his ideas. Even though they were laid down a long time ago they appear just as relevant now. In a society which I fundamentally see as getting more homogenized, in which the space within which an Individual can be both creative and destructive, harbor unappetizing views which go against the grain and be independent, is continuously decreasing, where the very idea of tolerance of those notions which we find absolutely abhorrent is being seen as debatable, the following thoughts appear very relevant. If I were to point out one distinctive barometer of the sophistication of civilization of a society I'd say it is how fiercely it protects the freedoms of those whose ideas it finds the most detestable. With this, on to the passage:

Mill's overmastering desire for variety and individuality for their own sake emerges in many shapes. He notes that 'Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest' - an apparent 'truism' which nevertheless, he declares, 'stands... opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice'... He remarks that it is the habit of his time to impose conformity to an 'approved standard', namely to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character; to maim by compression,..., every part of human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity... 'Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them... All the political changes of the age promote this assimilation, since they all tend to raise the low and to lower the high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings people under common influence... Improvements in means of communication promote it, as does the ascendancy of public opinion. There is so great a mass of influences hostile to Individuality that 'In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom is itself a service.' Conformity, and the intolerance which is its offensive and defensive arm, are for Mill always detestable, and peculiarly horrifying in an age which thinks itself enlightened... Mill's suspicion of democracy as the only just, and yet potentially the most oppressive, form of government springs from the same roots. He wondered uneasily whether centralization of authority and the inevitable dependence of each on all and 'surveillance of each and all' would not end by grinding all down into 'a tame uniformity of thought, dealings and actions', and produce 'automatons in human form'... Men's disposition to impose their own views on others is so strong that, in Mill's view, only want of power restricts it; this power is growing; hence unless further barriers are erected it will increase, leading to a proliferation of 'conformers', 'time-servers', hypocrites,.. and finally to a society where timidity has killed independent thought.

If one believes as I do in the essential randomness of life, in its inherent lack of value, I wonder if trying to attain a deep level of peace and a lack of complexity can then not be taken as a worthy goal in itself. I think everyone would take it with arms spread if they could manage it and I think almost everyone fails miserably at achieving it. In a certain philosophical sense it may be said that people fear of it getting too peaceful and yet disdain the dual of peace which is complexity. They are afraid of being left alone and yet cannot stand those that they find themselves among. This is a curious predicament. There is a deep dread of achieving what one truly wants and a deep discontent, in many little ways, of what one has.

I feel that the discontent arises because in a sense the level of complexity that exists in the world muddles up our own sense of self worth, tying it to other people, the standards of others, and a whole cornucopia of other things. Almost none of it is in an individual's control and, more importantly, there is a sinking realization that although most of these external agencies should have no business defining oneself in a deep personal way, they eventually end up doing so. And I feel that the dread of peace arises precisely because this is the only reality that we have all been taught. To derive meaning from external agencies. To let them define us. Take them away and our self worth plummets because we were never told how to cultivate it in vacuum.

I think it is possible to achieve a measure of peace in this world, despite the worst intentions of those who'd rather see us fail and, more importantly, despite the best intentions of those who love and care for us, of those who want us to succeed. I think ultimately the question of finding meaning and self worth is a superfluous question, merely a means to an end. It would vanish as an important question precisely when one is able to find an answer to it in vacuum.

Even though I do not believe in a god, I have found myself being on close terms with very many people who do believe. In fact, of the many people that I have come across, I think I can safely say that it has invariably been those who had some sort of a faith who I found easiest to connect with. These people have tended to have, consciously or subconsciously but certainly very ironically, a better grip on reality than people who profess not to believe. In fact, I'd say that I have had the misfortune of knowing far more atheists than I'd have cared for in this life. Some of them have been most brilliant and interesting people but the vast majority have been absolutely insufferable and embarrassingly simpleminded.

There are two questions which come to mind at this point. What is it about religious people in general which I, being a nonbeliever, find so attractive? I think they tend to have the kind of priorities in life which make for a generally contented and helpful person. These tendencies are deeply ingrained in them as they appear almost as a dictum from the powers that be. They do not have to reason these qualities and reason, in any case, can never be as strong as emotion can be. These people tend to be far less materialistic because they have the luxury of finding meaning in an agency which has little to do with the material world. The upshot of it all are people who tend not to drive me nuts by talking about food, clothing, gadgets, sports, and financial investments. Their lives amount to more than a simple distraction, something which cannot be said about a lot of people knocking about.

The second question which comes to mind is why, if I find the other side so attractive, do I not just join the camp. I think the answer to this is a deep predicament, perhaps the deepest that there is. I think my inability to believe has taken a very deep root and it is connected now to all sorts of other character traits of mine. At some level it is connected to a contempt for authority of all kinds and at another level it is connected to a deep seated lack of sympathy. At yet another level it is connected to my eternal suspicion that people generally do not know what they are talking about and, therefore, cannot be taken very seriously. The latter, of course, comes with the frank admission that I know very little myself, that my faint efforts at coherence are merely the stabs of a blind person in the dark, that life, in general, is merely Brownian motion, the random walk of a thoroughly inebriated tramp.

It is this view which makes it easier for me to connect with people who believe as I do not see any reason to feel smug or superior to them on account of the supposed power of logic and reasoning. Life to a nonbeliever must be arbitrary and it most certainly is to me. Fortunately enough, in the day to day workings of it, I find it not impossible to see it exactly as such and it thus becomes merely amusing. Amusement is my primary reaction to the vicissitudes of life and I think the good souls who do believe are not too offended by it. They are probably amused as well.

If I go back and look at my earliest posts from 6, 7 years ago, I notice a distinctly angry undertone in them. It is often the anger of a moralist and, by simple extension, the anger of a hypocritical and insecure person (my point being that all moralists are hypocrites). At some point I realized, perhaps not as clearly as I do now, the idiocy of my own views from that time and I tried to compensate for them by trying to see more love and beauty than I frankly could ever have stomached. Freewheeling compassion, love, empathy, happiness, joy, and sense of community are just not my cup of tea and I look at people who evince such emotions with the same skeptical eye that I use to look at used car salesmen. Such emotions are palatable to me only in small and measured doses and only in a very personal and quiet sort of context. So my effort at trying to be more compassionate on this blog turned out to be another kind of failure and I have again seen myself move, of late, towards a more negative tone. I think this time the negative tone is here to stay as it is a deep and honest reaction against some fundamental aspects of the times that we live in.

The answer to the question 'what is valuable' differs from person and person and also on what level it is being asked. On the level of a society the answer may be a utilitarian one: more happiness to most. On the level of an individual the answer will often be more selfish and will also be more flamboyant and diverse. Who can say that the value "more happiness to most" is not a good one? It is very hard to argue against until one sees it as being possible only as a result of a larger struggle, one between liberty and equality, between individuality and homogenization, between humanity and bureaucratization. I value the benefits of society but I wish they didn't come at such a grave cost to the I. And I almost wish that this was an earlier time, one where the tools of homogenization were not as sophisticated as they have become now, one were individuals were not reduced to market entities nearly to the extent that they are now, one where dehumanization wasn't as rampant as it is currently. Of course the prototypical product of the internet age - a person who appears light on depth and deep on superficial thought, a herd follower through and through, a person brought up on a steady dose of facebook likes, reddit upvotes, and instagram whatevers, a person who must not be taken seriously until he/she emerges from behind the shadows and owns up to his/her views and argues on behalf of them - will find it easy, almost instinctive to ridicule my yearning. What have we gained as a society and what have we lost and is it all really worth it? It's a hard question, one which is impossible to answer with any conviction now. But the answer will become clearer in the coming decades. I believe that the dehumanization project will become transparent enough for some of us to wonder as to why we bothered in the first place. And for some of us to then be confident in exclaiming that what's lost is incredibly more valuable than what's gained. We used to worry about bringing up our kids with reasonable economic and social capital, with his/her own proper sense of his/her own place in the world. This will not be an issue in the future, at least not in the same sense as the question itself will disappear. Every human aberration will be explained away through generic labels, mechanical descriptions, cured away through red, blue, and green pills, surveilled and converted into streams of data, stored, stashed away in giant monolithic buildings somewhere in the Nevada desert. All philosophical digressions will be drowned mercilessly by the collective hivemind of the ultraconnected society.

We will, in summary, have gained eternal sleep at the cost of our humanity.

If I were to think of describing civilization, by which I really mean society, in a pithy little sentence, I think I'd describe it as an essential compromise that humans have to make in order to rein in the strong and facilitate the survival of the weak. For the strong it is unfortunate and for the weak it is the only way out. For those who are so inclined it may be interesting to try to see it from different angles, and to try to peel away its many sly machinations. At its very heart there is only one goal for any civilization: the survival of its own ideas and its own ways of doing things at the cost, if necessary, of individuals and their possibly inconvenient inclinations. The ideas of a society do change but these changes are glacial and are never willed by those who hold the highest stakes in the current scheme of things. The ones who hold the highest stakes hold them through power both political and economic and neither of these powers is ever in the hands of the masses despite what appearances might suggest. There are two main things desired of the masses: 1. to obsess themselves only with trivialities and 2. to have pride, faith, respect and other similar bullshit emotions when they think about the system that they have. Religion used to play the role of the agent at which human obsession could be safely directed but it has, in the modern world, been replaced by materialism and looking at the inanity of the modern human being, I think the latter is a far more potent opium than the former ever was. The modern human is a shabby and useless specimen, merely a tool in the hands of a digital and heartless machinery. Pride, faith, and respect are cultivated indirectly and the training begins at home when one is told to respect our elders (and external authority by extension.) I have never understood the concept of respect by itself and nobody that I have asked has ever been able to provide me with a coherent, let alone convincing explanation of what it is. I don't know what it means and, therefore, I don't know who deserves it. I most certainly cannot fathom how it can be automatically deserved. And yet we are all told to bow in front of various authorities all our lives, not because it would be a prudent thing to do in a master-slave relationship which is the way it really is, but because the expectation is that we would find something inherently good and worthy about it. I think we as individuals would do well to cultivate a little more contempt. Contempt for the intelligence of authorities and contempt also for our fellow human being both young and old. Neither is as intelligent, prudent, or innocent as it seems.

A not dissimilar philosophy is, it seems to me, to be found in the writings of Tolstoy and other pessimists and quietists, both religious and irreligious. For these, particularly the most conservative among them, life is a stream moving in a given direction, or perhaps a tideless ocean stirred by occasional breezes. The number of factors which cause it to be as it is, is very great, but we know only very few of them. To seek to alter things radically in terms of our knowledge is therefore unrealistic, often to the point of absurdity. We cannot resist the central current, for they are much stronger than we, we can only tack, only trip to the winds and avoid collisions with the great fixed institutions of our world, its physical and biological laws, and the great human establishments with their roots deep in the past - the empires, the Churches, the settled beliefs and habits of mankind. For if we resist these, our small craft will be sunk, and we shall lose our lives to no purpose. Wisdom lies in avoiding situations where we may capsize, in using the winds that blow as skilfully as we can, so that we may last at any rate our own time, preserve the heritage of the past, and not hurry towards a future which will come soon enough, and may be darker even than the gloomy present. On this view it is the human predicament - the disproportion between our vast designs and our feeble means - that is responsible for much of the suffering and injustice of the world. Without help, without divine grace, or one or other form of divine intervention, we shall not, in any case, succeed. Let us then be tolerant and charitable and understanding, and avoid the folly of accusation and counter-accusation which will expose us to the laughter or pity of later generations. Let us seek to discern what we can - some dim outline of a pattern - in the shadows of the past, for even so much is surely difficult enough.

- Isaiah Berlin in Historical Inevitability commenting upon the human predicament as seen by Tolstoy and others. Berlin's point is to clarify one of the set of thoughts through which value judgment and ultimately personal responsibility can be dissolved. I found this passage succinct, illuminating, and a brilliant distillation of what I find to be my own views, continuously in flux.

I have a complicated relationship with science and tech on one side and religion and intuition on the other. I find none of the ease with which people seem to be able to belong to one camp or the other feeling uncomfortable, as I do, at the abject surrender of humanity and individuality which both sides demand as the price of entry into their communities. Intuition had its time which can be said to be past now and we saw during that time its monstrous transformation into a system of monolithic and absolute dictum, ruling the general populace with a hand at once heavy and cruel. We saw it transform into a hideous excuse for controlling the lives of other people in this time and we saw the deadening of the romance which lies at the heart of religion, its ossification into a soulless, pointless, and mediocre set of rules and regulations. When the time came this idiotic and hollowed out framework crumbled under the spirit of the age, it surrendered its limited acuity against the skeptical attitude of the various sciences. And now we have come full circle. Science, and its bastard child which goes by the name of tech, isn't as idiotic as the logic of organized religions but its followers certainly compete very well in the area of intellectual incompetence. For they have again thrown in their lot with an agency they do not understand very well.

At this point it is clear to me that the relentless march of science will serve only to increase the misery of most in this world. In material terms it will drive most people out of a means to earn a reasonable living, eliminating in the process the dignity which humans find in doing a hard day's labor and creating something out of the rough materials of life. This is already seen to be increasingly true in many many areas. On the spiritual front it will hollow out the humans of their humanity, reducing them to atomistic and simplistic entities useful only to the extent where an explanation of the impersonal world is sought. Like leaves, snails, and dust. Not only will it reduce the worth of humans in the context of universal explanations, it will also reduce their worth in their own eyes. In the absence of true humanity, unchecked science will, and has already begun to, reduce humans, their cognition, and their total attention to mere market activities. To notice the modern urban human is to notice a remarkable likeness to a soulless robot, exactly as dead and exactly as mundane.

I ultimately disagree with Berlin's hypothesis that there is no such thing as the inevitability of history. I think there is and the world as we find now could not have been otherwise, or at least would have reached the same stage at an earlier or later time . All that one can do is try to control the short range flows but the long range effects seem to have a force of their own. I think in this sense there is an inevitability in the passing of the baton from religion to science, in the passing of idiocy as well. I'm curious to see the next moves.