I’m trying to parse the larger scale here. Is there an objective? Am I wasting my time?
Is there anything I could type that would make you into an ally of life and joy?
Possibly.
Is my brain capable of that?
Almost certainly not.
I have a lot of thinking to do.
I’m going to write another book. I’ve had this debate and lost too many friends too many times. If I’m to be alone I’m going to do something with my time alone.
Context alters meaning and you can always add context. I’m going to try and find the positive context I can add to this life that will carry it’s meaning in a positive direction far enough to absorb the losses incurred by the agents of life and death.
It’s ironic. If I thought like you there would be fewer of you.
Your parasitic exploitative toxic existence is the best argument against the kind of universal compassion I advocate.
The only hope in the long term is that your own self aggrandizement and mammoth disregard for the well being of the rest of the species will lead to your collective annihilation through peaceful means easily avoided by those of us with a mind capable of something other than exploitation and narcissism.
When the cure for death becomes available, I hope your kind will find reason to turn it down. The future will be all the better for it.
“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” ~Edward Osborne Wilson, The Father of Sociobiology.
Your kind represents a classic conflict of scale.
If I know a man that’s drowning will only kill two others if I save him, am I still ethically bound to try?
Similarly. Is my rejection of vengeance and war wise if I know that the only people who profit from it are monsters like yourself?
“The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” ~Adolf Hitler
Your existence forces me to choose between letting you have your way, or becoming you in order to stop you.
Your existence is proof that karma, cosmic justice, and god are all myths.
I can only hope that patience and restraint will allow me to outlive you, and hopefully undo whatever damage you did while living.
Know that I hate you. Know how hard it is for me suffer your existence.
There is nothing beautiful about death. Period. I know that.
But knowing what you people are, makes the illusion so nearly convincing.
Humanity is a killing machine. That’s what Intelligence is. It’s what we have instead of 1000 pounds of muscle and 6 inch claws.
Allies of pain and death would have us continue to direct that awesome power at each other instead of at suffering and death because they are more than cowards. They are delusional allies of death.
You’re all worse than pointless. You’re human monsters. A corruption of our infinite benevolent potential into it’s inverse grotesque opposite. Sometimes you present individually as polite, pleasant monsters, but monsters you remain because death and pain for our species is now a choice. You were not born a human being, and human beings if not saddled by the various servants of death and pain like yourself could destroy pain and death as efficiently as we destroyed polio and the saber tooth.
You were bred to be pliant live stock. First to a parent, then to a teacher, then to a priest, then to a spouse, and finally after you’ve popped out and trained a few larvae, you are expected to die with words of praise for your masters on your lips. That’s the life plan they gave you. You have a choice. Resist or submit.
And how do you respond to someone who wants nothing but your happiness and long life? Scolding for it. As if again my hatred of death and pain is flippant, trivial, and *intolerant.*
Your guilt at being a party to death, your fear of suffering, has clouded your judgement.
Despite having volumes on exactly how they did it, you still belly flop on their land mine with a self satisfied grin on your face.
I’m just as guilty apparently of failing to learn. I write these posts because again and again I reach out and again and again I am disappointed. Is that not the popular definition of insanity?
That is the question of my life. Is mercy and hope a fool’s errand? Should I become one of you and show you what Intelligence is really capable of if deployed as a weapon? I hope to never fall so far but every day one of you makes a persuasive argument that is hard to disregard.
I see agents of death and pain everywhere. I see their tools at work and I can’t help but picture how the world could be a little bit better if one or two monsters had heart attacks or car wrecks. And from there, from wishing for random death, it’s a small step to planning. I see the slope you’d have me dash for.
Time and again I encounter hope and temptation. I often think I’ve found an ally. But when the chips are down and it’s time to speak up against the real enemies of humanity, you all show your true colors.
Yours is a legacy of death, pain, and delusional. A world where suffering and the grave are made beautiful by your rejection of reason.
You are a walking software lobotomy. You choke and starve your own reason because it screams at you everything that’s wrong with the world and how to fix it but the price is so high… Change.
It’s so ironic. Agents of decay often accuse me of being anti-people by opposing death and pain. But if I were really interested in being anti-people would I not embrace the death and suffering of others?
Look at the countless ways society would embrace me if I did that. I could be a solider, or a prison guard, or a priest. There are a thousand ways I could profit from aiding death and pain and the rewards for doing so are immense, if by definition short lived and narrow minded.
How did I get here? Pain and death didn’t teach me this lesson. Love did. I cannot convey how much joy and wonder I experienced as a child.
I’ve had various tiny sips of the truly staggering heights of fulfillment the human brain can experience, even without reconstruction and transhumanist enhancement. Dreams taught me the value of life and joy.
How joyless your life must be, how ignorant you are of your gifts, to believe that death and pain are your ally. But of course you think you can deploy death and pain and not get any on you. Sadly, sometimes you’re right. Countless torturers and murderers lived long and fulfilled lives.
Again, that is the core question of my life. Am I a fool for being an ally of life and joy?
It’s so hilarious. We justify pain on the grounds that it helps us avoid death and we justify death on the grounds that it allows us to escape pain. It’s fucking maddening to me.
We measure our problem intensity by death rate, yet death itself we’re 99% cool with. It’s literally insane to me. I feel like I’m trapped in an asylum.
Is pain and death a worthy price to pay for my existence?
Of course not.
My only value on this earth currently is my opposition to pain and death. Had there been no pain or death I would have found a positive use for myself as opposed to merely countering something else of negative value.
If I was omnipotent and all knowing I could snap into existence a world without pain and suffering even if the price of that was a world without me.
This is how I know there is not now, nor has there ever been a white light god.
What reality isn’t tells me about the past and the present.
All that pain and death gave me is valueless.
Pain and death gave me fear and rage. I would be a far better ally of life and joy had I never experienced pain or death.
The Buddhists understand this which is why the myth/story of Siddhārtha Gautama starts in a pleasure garden.
If I could kill myself and take all pain and death with me, I would do it.
The only reason I would pause is to search for a way to have the best of both worlds, to live in that painless deathless world as well. I would also pause knowing that anyone, including me can be scammed.
But ultimately, if I truly believed my death could accomplish that ultimate feat, of course I’d die.
I must admit however that I would not suffer. I am a human monster by default and pain is worse than death. I would only sacrifice my life to accomplish this goal if the pain required were sufficiently minimal.
I would not for example burn myself alive to end all torture and death. And that is my flaw as a human. But do you see the irony? If I could not feel pain, I could accept any kind of death you want to accomplish that goal.
Pain makes us weaker, not stronger. Death merely makes us absent and silent.
*”Such modes of consciousness are simply unimaginable to the drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic pathways lie across forbidden gaps in the evolutionary fitness landscape. They have previously been hidden by the pressure of natural selection: for Nature has no power of anticipation.”* ~David Pierce
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You’re the worst kind of human.
You’re like antifreeze. Sweet to the taste, but a torturous death to all who drink.
You probably genuinely believe you’re this kind and empathic thing, but you’re actually a torturer from the cell up.
You’re Ebola with a cortex.
The memes you are carrying and the skills you are acquiring to deploy them will contribute to the delay of our final victory over suffering and death.
Every second of your success means hell and death for thousands, perhaps millions of strangers.
You are a coward, and a sadist. And yet if I saw you drowning I would save you.
Because for me intellectual courage and kindness are ends in and of themselves, not merely tools, as you clearly use them.
Like Torquemada you’ll smile at the horror you create around you secure in the unshakable faith that its rightness is defined by the very screams and silence it creates.
And still, knowing what you are, I do not wish you death, or suffering. My wishes and objective are to out pace you, and to obviate you. To build around you a preserve and memetic quarantine until such time as a more ethical solution can be devised and enacted.
One of us is probably a fool, the other, a true monster.
Your immunity to reason and self righteous callousness horrifies me.
The way to handle you people is not futility attempting to reason with you, but rather to counter your works and wait for your ally death to indulge its nature.
Step one of that objective is to call you out when you are detected. That way no one wastes time buying into your illusion of open mindedness.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ~Max Planck
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I’m saying if we as a species choose not to fight death then we have collectively chosen suicide.
Some say death is ‘natural’, but so is rape, and we fight rape, at least outside of prisons and youth detention centers anyway. We’d like to see, at least in terms of rhetoric and policy, rape banished from the human world.
Yet when it comes to aging people are so hopelessly whipped they don’t even contemplate what it costs us.
We’re slaves to death and pain and any men or women who wield them.
Not only is it possible to change that, it is morally urgent to do so, and you’ll agree with me when your pain starts. It could be an injury, or sickness, but eventually something will truly hurt you. Hopefully science can address that pain, with a drug or a treatment, but eventually as it stands, either your pain will defeat efforts to control it or you will die.
We tolerate death because it is sometimes preferable to lasting pain. But using one wrong to justify another is broken logic. Aging is a disease, and it needs a cure. Pain is a disease and it needs a cure other than death.
“They could be shown the mastery of their minds and bodies, so that they could achieve the full expression of their powers, not spend their lives like ineffectual ghosts trapped in a marvelous machine beyond their skill to operate. They could break the domination of pain, so that it became a sentinel and not a tyrant, sending messages which the rational mind could accept or ignore as it pleased. Above all, they could choose to die only when they wished; they would be shown the many paths that led beyond the grave, and the price that must be paid for immortality in all its forms. A vista of infinite time would open up before them, with all its terror and promise. Some minds could face this, some could not; here was the dividing line between those who would inherit the universe, and those who were only quick-witted animals.” ~Arthur C Clarke (Via character.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence
Aging is an adaptation like everything else about life. When an adaptation stops being adaptive you have two choices, change, or die.
There is a word for choosing to die.
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See also: http://underlore.com/pain-is-worthless/
