Consider these points:
- Our entire life stories are fixed by our genetics and our childhood environment (nature and nurture, more broadly), both of which we did not choose;
- Our bodies are slowly growing more frail and debilitated until we die of something such as heart disease, cancer or stroke (or accident before then);
- Even if someone develops a cure for aging, most of the experts who have studied the issue estimate about a 50/50 chance that our species will survive this century;
- We live on a giant rotating planet, in an unimaginably large universe that is almost all empty space, and appears to be lifeless;
- The fact that we were designed by evolution to value or desire certain things doesn’t seem to justify actually valuing or desiring them;
- While most people believe in some sort of religion that provides cosmic context, the thousands of religions contradict each other, and all appear to be fictions created by men;
- While most people believe in an “afterlife,” people don’t believe that parts of a crazy person’s mind go to Heaven when he loses them; by extrapolation, all of a person’s mind doesn’t go to Heaven when you lose all of it.
My point is not to push these beliefs onto anyone who resists them. I suspect, though, that most OB readers already think they are facts. And I suspect that many otherwise religious people, in their heart of hearts, already believe the above too.
My point, instead, is to make an observation about the above set of facts, which I’ll call “the human condition,” in the pessimistic sense. My observation is this: while all of the above facts can be considered an insult or injury, there is one more that goes largely unnoticed. The final insult is that we are not supposed to talk about the human condition. Indeed, we are not even supposed to acknowledge its existence. I call this last insult the “Meta-Human Condition”—the salt in the wound.
Continue reading "The Meta-Human Condition" »
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