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A Day in the Future

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I awake in bed. I’m warm and safe, like every morning. Outside it is twenty below zero, but from inside my home winter seems far away.

As I rise and stretch, I notice I’m sore. Not from tending the fields though. I have no fields. Some unseen person does all the field-tending for me. Sometimes I forget that there’s any field-tending going on at all.

I buy all my food — I wouldn’t know how to grow it or hunt it. Three or four hours’ pay gets me a week’s worth. It’s a pretty good arrangement. I’m thirty years old and I’ve never gone a day without food.

My soreness is actually from my leisure time, not work. I spent yesterday sliding down a snow-covered slope with a board attached to my feet. After that I was pretty worn out, so I went to a friend’s house, drank beer that was wheeled in from Mexico by another person I never met, and watched a sporting event as it unfolded in Philadelphia.

I don’t live in Philadelphia, but my friend has a machine that lets us see what’s happening there. I have one too. Almost everyone does.

The sun won’t rise for another hour, but I don’t need to light a fire or candles. I have artificial ones, mounted on the ceiling. Hit a tiny switch and I can see everything, any time of day.

I bathe while standing. The water comes out whatever temperature I like.

I use a few machines in my kitchen to get my breakfast ready. It takes about five minutes. Toasted buckwheat groats with raisins, almonds, dates and sunflower seeds. I don’t know where it came from but I’d be surprised if it was from anywhere near here. Read More

by David on January 12, 2011
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28 More-Than-Just-Clever Remarks From One of History’s Great Smartasses

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No one could turn a phrase like Oscar Wilde, but I think the truth in Wilde’s remarks is often overlooked because of how witty he made them.

Though he was known primarily for his wit, Wilde had a dramatic and difficult life, perpetually running afoul of society’s values, giving him some poignant things to say about humankind. It’s easy to have a quick laugh at an Oscar Wilde quip without recognizing the profound statement he is really making about human beings and their values.

The following are more than just snarky comments. Laugh, but don’t forget to think too.

***

1. Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

2. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

3. What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

4. A true friend stabs you in the front.

5. I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

6. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

7. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

8. Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

9. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

10. America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. Read More

by David on September 20, 2010
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Who You Really Are (Pt. 2)

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This is part two of a two-part post. Monday’s article explained that you are not your mind or your body, but the aware space in which your mind and your body (and everything else) exist. You’ll have to read the first part to understand the context of this post.

So if you are in fact the space in which all things happen, how come you don’t always notice this space? Why does it often seem like it’s just the things that exist? If the space is you, wouldn’t it always be apparent?

Not necessarily. Think about it: you are that space, so when you are not aware of that space, it only means the space is not aware of itself. But it can still be aware of the things happening in that space, without seeing what it is that is aware. It’s a major oversight, but it is also the normal state of human existence — complete identification with form, with things.

We usually don’t recognize the space in which the tangibles of our lives happen, so we figure we must be one of those tangible, perishable things, or some combination of them. The thing, or collection of things, that we normally think we are is called the ego.

When you lose sight of the space that contains all things (including your ego) you are lost in things. You have lost sight of yourself, and the play of things seems to be all there is. Things become supremely important, because they’re all you have.

That’s a shame, because all of those things are doomed by their very nature. They’re nice when they’re around, but they are fleeting and perishable. So it’s no wonder that when we become identified with things we feel a persistent uneasiness. They are all fleeting — very certainly, inarguably, on their way out, and some part of us knows that. When life is only a race to manipulate material things into the most preferable arrangement possible before you die, it feels like a losing battle. It is.

This is how most of us live, utterly identified with our thoughts, under the impression that life is nothing but things, and that we are nothing but one of those things. Read More

by David on September 9, 2010
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To My Fellow Skeptics (and Believers Too)

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The first few times I heard about God, I was already suspicious. My earliest clear memory of it was when I was five, leaning against the screen door of our small town home with my older sister, watching a midsummer thunderstorm unfold.

We were in awe, like I have been at every thunderstorm since. I don’t remember if I asked, but my sister said it was God who made the lightning and thunder. Not that she was ever religious, that’s just what her eight-year old mind told me that day. I took note.

At that point, nearly all of my ideas about God had come from Family Circus comics. The kids each prayed every night before bed, depicted casually as if it’s something every normal person does. In one comic, Dolly prays for her father to make it home safely from his trip to New York. The opposite panel shows a rainy street scene in which a six-foot translucent hand stops her Dad from stepping in front of a speeding taxi.

Seriously?

Later on, in my teenage years, I would recognize the Family Circus to be a conservative, unapologetically fundamentalist cartoon, but at the time I wasn’t aware of the play of politics in the things I read and watched. I just knew that the God they depicted didn’t make a whole lot of sense. This was the idea of God I had, and I rejected it, because it made sense to do so.

Sometime in junior high, when I was becoming more politically aware, I remember being shocked one day when I realized that ordinary adults — too old for the likes of the Family Circus — actually still believed in this God thing. Not just the crazies on televangelist shows either, but real, respectable adults who could be found in church on any given Sunday, singing hymns while looking upward with their eyes closed, really believing that they were in contact with this big translucent man, presumably when he’s not busy casting lightning bolts over my hometown, or saving Bil Keane from the natural consequences of wandering into traffic without looking both ways. Read More

by David on August 30, 2010
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The Purpose of Life, Revealed

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Last week I ran into a few online discussions about those big, big questions that often come up in late-night conversations: Why are we here? What is our purpose?

Strictly speaking, as members of the human species we do have a purpose. But we didn’t choose it, and it might not be us who stands to benefit from it. In fact, you might find our purpose quite upsetting. Maybe you don’t want to know. If you want to take the proverbial “Red Pill”, read on. While it might be alarming at first, it is also very enlightening, and could change forever how you view yourself and what you want to do with your life.

Today’s post is a particularly long one, but it does contain the meaning of life, so it may be worth your while.

To understand it we have to start with a quick biology lesson.

Everything you do, you do for you

It really seems like no matter what we do, we are always serving ourselves in some way. Every action you take is to fulfill some desire that you have, whether that desire is to eat a chocolate cake, run away from a bee, or to help your nephew with his homework. You do it because it promises to deliver something you want.

Even charity and philanthropy always seem to have some identifiable benefit to the giver: recognition, tax rebates, or even just a good feeling inside. There are always incentives for our behavior, and so it seems that we cannot escape self-interest.

That’s okay though. Self-interest doesn’t need to take the form of blatant selfishness, as we tend to call it — taking something for yourself at the expense of somebody else. But sometimes it does, in the form of theft, greed, or physical domination.

Most of us have learned that we can usually serve ourselves better by complying with society’s values than we could by violating them. Approaching life by stealing everything you need would almost certainly lead to a less desirable situation for you than working for and buying everything you need. Read More

by David on July 26, 2010
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It’s Not What It Looks Like

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swastika in the sidewalk

Today I saw something on the sidewalk that made me stop. Somebody had etched a small swastika in the concrete.

I wouldn’t say it exactly upset me, but it got me genuinely curious… who did that?

Presumably, some kid stumbled across a rare chance to immortalize himself in unguarded wet concrete, and this was his choice. Did he really subscribe to Nazi ideology, or was he just experimenting with shock value?

The sidewalk bordered a park, beside a high school. Did he go to that school? No, he was probably younger. Did he scrawl that symbol in an effort to prove his badness to his friends, or was he alone when he did it?

It couldn’t possibly be a girl.

A rather definite picture of him formed in my head: grade 5 or 6, white, a little bit fat, buzzed brown hair, and his eyebrows come to rest in a scowl. He picked on smaller kids in younger grades sometimes. He hangs around with two kids who are smaller than he is, and they look up to him. He isn’t aware of it, but he speaks with authority when they are around, and at no other time.

I pictured the three of them, crossing the park after school. When they reach the sidewalk, our anti-hero notices the tell-tale dark patch on the sidewalk: freshly poured concrete, and nobody watching. All three are excited, but the two smaller kids wait for the big kid to do something.

He pushes his index finger in, and is disappointed to find it’s been drying for a while — he can’t make a mark. Determined, he grabs a stone, and gouges a vertical line, then crosses it with another. Still not entirely sure what he’s aiming for, he scores the four remaining lines, and sits back to look at it. The other two don’t know what to make of it, and aren’t sure whether to be impressed. But they are most comfortable saying nothing, as is the main kid. The trio gets up and leaves, vaguely disappointed in their first vandalism experience.

That’s when I realized I had become completely carried away by my thoughts. I had sat down, without really noticing, on the slope overlooking the field. I took a photo.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m in the twilight phase of my overseas trip and I do have a lot of spare time on my hands. On a different day I might have just carried on walking. Pretty much anybody would have (although in the photo you can clearly see that somebody has tried to scratch it out — who?) But today, evidently I was affected by what I’d seen. Not distraught, just intensely curious about the moment it appeared there.

In reality, I wasn’t affected by what I’d seen. I was affected by my thoughts. All of that imagery was completely my own work — everything other than the six scratches in the sidewalk. Human motives fascinate me, but if I had not learned to associate that particular symbol with certain human motives, it would have just been a simple little doodle on the sidewalk. The symbol itself is inert. It is not harmful. We react to what we infer from it. So ultimately, I reacted to a part of myself. Read More

by David on June 10, 2010
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If Society is Sick, What Should We Do About It?

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riot cops

There is a quote, much celebrated by activists, cynics, and political science students the world over, that I think could use a second look:

“It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

I like Krishnamurti, and I think he’s being misunderstood here, but I’ll get to that. Taken at face value, I disagree.

Activists, particularly those who nurture a general dislike for humankind at large, prize this snarky quote because it seems to validate the notion that only others need to change.

If our society is profoundly sick and we should refuse to adapt to it, then what is it that we’re supposed to adapt to? Or perhaps the sneaky insinuation is that some of us are already perfect, and no adjustments are necessary. Indeed, the implication of activism seems to be that it is others who need to correct their course — CEOs of petroleum companies, mindless consumers, fans of Glenn Beck, people who talk during movies or don’t use their turn signals — they are society’s sickness, and if they can be made to shape up, we’ll finally be sitting pretty.

Society does have its problems: crime, poverty, war, pollution, overpopulation and political corruption. It’s no utopia, clearly, but what is the best way to approach these problems?

Misanthropes and other “the-world-has-gone-to-shit” types would have you believe the solution is to identify the groups and individuals responsible for the “sickness” of society, and find a way to disempower them, expose them, or destroy them. With some grassroots support and some elbow grease they can get some new policies in place, install a new breed of political leaders, and usher into fashion a more progressive philosophy about how to govern, do business, and treat your fellow man… and in the mean time, sourly refuse to adapt to the human world as it is now, because that would only encourage the evil corporations and lying politicians who make it so troublesome.

But that won’t work. The “sickness” is not that some nasty people have come into power, but that human beings across the board are still working primarily from their stone-age instincts. The detractors of The Establishment are just as consumed by their own needs for personal power, righteousness, security and social dominance as the people they so proudly hate.

We are so newly removed from our original stomping ground that we are almost completely inexperienced with running civilizations smoothly. We’re much more efficiently wired to orchestrate a successful mammoth hunt than govern a nation intelligently. Civilization is barely out of the package. Read More

by David on May 31, 2010
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40 Belief-Shaking Remarks From a Ruthless Nonconformist

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nietzsche

If there’s one thing Friedrich Nietzsche did well, it’s obliterate feel-good beliefs people have about themselves. He has been criticized for being a misanthrope, a subvert, a cynic and a pessimist, but I think these assessments are off the mark. I believe he only wanted human beings to be more honest with themselves.

He did have a remarkable gift for aphorism — he once declared, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” A hundred years after his death, Nietzsche retains his disturbing talent for turning a person’s worldview upside-down with one jarring remark.

Even today his words remain controversial. They hit nerves. Most of his views are completely at odds with the status quo.

Here are 40 unsympathetic statements from the man himself. Many you’ll agree with. Others you will resist, but these are the ones to pay the most attention to — your beliefs are being challenged. It’s either an opportunity to grow, or to insist that you already know better. If any of them hit a nerve in you, ask yourself why.

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1. People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

2. He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

3. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

4. There are no facts, only interpretations. Read More

by David on March 26, 2010
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Forget About World Peace

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world peace

Despite the earnest efforts of sixty years of Miss USA contestants, world peace has not arrived on our doorstep. The UN has not managed it, nor did John Lennon or Oprah or The Secret. Religion sure made a mess of the effort altogether, and I don’t hold high hopes for China to pull it off, despite their latest efforts.

Something tells me it’s not coming at all.

If that’s true, could we live with that?

I say let’s forget the idea of world peace. Let’s admit it will never happen and get on with our lives the best we can. It is naive to think that progressive government policy, awareness campaigns, and heartfelt pleading will bring about this holy grail of achievements, and that is because human beings are not capable of world peace. There, I said it.

Let’s get real here. Humanity will never co-operate. It’s far too big and varied for that; there is no way to even communicate amongst the whole populace, let alone get everyone on the same page at the same time. Just trying to get eight people on the same page to organize a camping trip is trouble enough for most.

The vast majority of us really have to work at keeping ourselves in a stable, pleasant mood, so why do we concern ourselves with a task that is so utterly beyond us? If we think we can engineer a change in the philosophy of billions of people we’ve never met, yet most of us cannot even manage to fulfill our New Year’s resolutions, we’re kidding ourselves big time. Read More

by David on January 28, 2010
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How to Enjoy Your Forgotten Superpowers

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hammer and anvil

I forged my own blade yesterday, from an unassuming piece of plain steel. With some expert instruction, I pounded it on an anvil, ground the blade down, fitted it with a brass hilt, polished and sharpened it. The handle is made out of native timber that was salvaged from a dismantled insane asylum. Read More

by David on January 21, 2010
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