Quote of the day

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Ernest Becker from The Denial of Death

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Trust me: considerably more fateful and ironic for some than for others.

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does.

What say the beavers here?

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.

Next up: modern transgender.

...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.

No, really: https://www.thoughtco.com/worth-of-your ... ts-3976054

...the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith.

Not unlike the worst existential analysis of it.

Man literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Again, pick one:

1] genes
2] memes
3] a numbingly convoluted entanglement of both

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Nihilism...

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it.” Charles Bukowski

I'll drink to that.

“I can't go on, I'll go on.” Samuel Beckett

Cue the Grim Reaper.

“If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?” Chuck Palahniuk

Of course, I'll be both eventually.

“Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.” Brent Weeks

Next up: a just God.

“There must be somebody there, because somebody must have said 'Nobody'.” A.A. Milne

Yeah, what about that?

“Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.” Joseph Heller

And then the ripeness here!

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Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger

Two wrongs don't make a riot.

Cute. But we'll still need a context.

They're a pack of dimpled fuckwits and you can tell them I said so.

Fuckwits or pinheads...here, what's the difference?

When people want to be reimbursed for their pain they seldom are.

Indeed, as often as not it's just more pain.

And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark.

Okay, how fast is that?

He waited for many years to hear from God what it was that was expected of him. What he was to do with this life. But God never said.

Simple enough: birth, school, work, death.

Is history about money?

Either that or not having enough of it.

[attofishpi]

And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark.

Okay, how fast is that?

=

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Stupidity...

“Obviously this person's a hazard. Stupid people are dangerous.” Suzanne Collins

And, no, not just in The Hunger Games. Not even in the eqivalent of that here.

"You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance” Alfred de Vigny

MAGA!

“She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.” Joan Rivers

Or today, world war MMXXIII.

“It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked.” L.M. Montgomery

Hard to Trump that, right?

“It never ceases to amaze me that in times of amazing human suffering somebody says something that can be so utterly stupid.” Robert Gibbs

For example: Sieg Heil.

“One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless.” Henry Miller

Go ahead, give it your best shot: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

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Mary Roach from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance, and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot.

Good to know?

As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.

Good to know?

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space."

Ha ha?

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.

Well, not counting immortality and salvation perhaps.

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?

Philosophically in other words.

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don’t find “anal” on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn’t really use words like anal. Unless they have to.

Anyone use it here?

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John N. Gray from Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Among Christians, only Protestants have ever believed that work smacks of salvation; the work and prayer of medieval Christendom were interspersed with festivals. The ancient Greeks sought salvation in philosophy, the Indians in meditation, the Chinese in poetry and the love of nature. The pygmies of the African rainforests – now nearly extinct – work only to meet the needs of the day, and spend most of their lives idling.

So, what do you figure...capitalism?

Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction.

See, I told you. Repeatedly, right?

Today, serving neither religion nor political faith, philosophy is a subject without a subjuct matter, scolasticism without the charm of dogma.

See, I told you. Repeatedly, right?

...a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest.

Well, unless it is up in the intellectual clouds.

There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution...
Human knowledge is one thing, human well-being is another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two...
In the struggle for life, the taste for truth is a luxury-or else a disability...

In other words, for starters...

Western thought is fixated on the gap between what is and what ought to be.

Indeed and look where that has gotten us.

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Norman Mailer from The Executioner's Song

Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.

Death...the intellectual contraption.

He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.

Jack Henry Abbott, for example.

This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war.

My guess: among many, many other things.

Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.

Of course, boring might not be the word you'd pick.

...but I am infinitely more sorrowful about the two victims’ families than the fact Mr. Gilmore is no longer alive.

Or at least a lot more sorrowful.

Then the Warden said, “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, “Let’s do it.” That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he’d ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.

So, they did it.
Courageously?

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Jeanette Winterson from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

Of course: if the shoe fits.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.

Well, not counting the one that actually is.

What the church calls love is actually psychosis and...what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's.

Uh, oh...what if that is actually true, henry quack?

It is necessary to distinguish the chalk circle from the stone wall.

I've never failed to myself.
Luck?

I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin.

Fuck that, he thought.

If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches.

Peanut butter and jelly, right?

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Harper Lee from To Kill a Mockingbird

We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.

Pick one:
1] you're a liberal
2] you're a conservative

You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.

Tell that to Hank Reardon.
If you get my drift.

There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

Or, here, down the threads.

It's not time to worry yet.

Though it is time to start practicing.

Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?

Of course, that happens all the time here.

We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe- some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others- some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men. But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.

Cue the billionaires, Clarence?

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Cynicism...

“I rather fancy, if you will forgive me an aphorism, that we live in not the Age of Reason, as so many proclaim, but in that of Ignorance; for there is nothing reason so readily proclaims to the attentive mind as the extent of our ignorance. It transforms what were once mysteries, for ever inaccessible to human comprehension, into merely phenomena we have not yet explained, and thereby at once increases what we know and what we do not.” Brian Ruckley

You gotta love the irony, right?

“As share prices rise, the money men ratchet up immense profits, leaving bankers with a juicy cut. And when the bubble bursts, the bankers dial the number of their favorite politician, whose campaign they featherbedded, and, before anyone notices, their losses are transferred to the taxpayer — many of whom the banks evict from their homes after foreclosing on their mortgages." Yanis Varoufakis

Okay, but only until the workers of the world unite. On this planet, I mean.

“It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it...” John Green

Now you're talking!

“I’ve got one less eye to see half as much cruelty.” Steven Seril

Next up: one less ear.

...for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.” George Orwell

Here's my own favorite rendition of that: https://youtu.be/3-uRUTTz0Q0

“People doom and damn themselves with their own perverse and pessimistic beliefs about reality.” David Sinclair

As though in this world it doesn't make sense to.
Well, for some more than others.

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John Gray from The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.

If only so far.

From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.

Probably?

When truth is at odds with meaning, it is meaning that wins. Why this should be so is a delicate question. Why is meaning so important? Why do humans need a reason to live? Is it because they could not endure life if they did not believe it contained hidden significance?

Probably?

Perhaps Hitler’s genius was not demagogy, not lying, but the fundamentally irrational approach to the masses, the appeal to the pre-logical, totemistic mentality.

Next up: Trump's genius?

History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but – everyone insists – the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair.

Maybe, but I gave it up anyway. And probably before you were born.

A type of atheism that refused to revere humanity would be a genuine advance.

I do what I can, of course.

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Louis-Ferdinand Céline from Journey to the End of the Night

Even memories have their youth. When you let them grow old, they turn into revolting phantoms dripping with selfishness, vanity, and lies. They rot like apples.

And don't forget that.

How terrifying! All alone with two million stark-raving heroic madmen, armed to the eyeballs? With and without helmets, without horses, on motorcycles, bellowing, in cars, screeching, shooting, plotting, flying, kneeling, digging, taking cover, bounding over trails, sputtering, shut up on earth as if it were a loony bin, ready to demolish everything on it, Germany, France, whole continents, everything that breathes, destroy, destroy, madder than mad dogs, worshipping their madness...a hundred, a thousand times madder than a thousand dogs, and a lot more vicious! A pretty mess we were in! No doubt about it, this crusade I’d let myself in for was the apocalypse.

And the equivalent of that here?

You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex. How, when I left the Place Clichy, could I have imagined such horror? Who could have suspected, before getting really into the war, all the ingredients that go to make up the rotten, heroic, good-for-nothing soul of man? And there I was, caught up in a mass flight into collective murder, into the fiery furnace…Something had come up from the depths, and this is what happened.

Now that takes me back.

I had always suspected myself of being almost purposeless, of not really having any single serious reason for existing. Now I was convinced, in the face of the facts themselves, of my personal emptiness.

Been there, done that.

A time comes when you’re all alone, when you’ve come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It’s the end of the world.

The clock's ticking. Mine? Double-time.

There's something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't even try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care.

If only 365 days a year.

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Ernest Becker from The Denial of Death

A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned-finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complex reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself-least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned.

I know, I know: shh...

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?

I know, I know: shh...

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth.

Kind of repetitive, isn't he?
And, yeah, I know: like me.

Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

I've been trying now for years myself.

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don’t believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.

Cue DC comics and Marvel. For the pinheads, I mean.

Man must always imagine and believe in a "second" reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.

How's that going for you? Oh, and would you like to know how it's going for me?

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Nihilism...

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” Albert Camus

On the other hand, what if you believe in that?

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.” Alan Moore

Or there abouts, Rorschach?

“That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.” Eugène Ionesco

That's coming from him, of course.

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.” John Fowles

So, why not kidnap Miranda?

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism...it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” Flannery O'Connor

Sure, the Church. Whatever works.

“I look up to heaven only when I want to sneeze.” Ivan Turgenev

God bless you.