Meltdown

After much thought (wouldn’t it be fun to start a post with the phrase, “After a minimal amount of thought”), I have concluded that there is no rational basis for the foundation of any belief structure. So I am resigning myself to certain fundamental principles without a rational basis, knowing full well that they are most likely tainted from norms internalized in early childhood. These will be my “weak” commandments, so to speak, and I will hang onto them until someone can show me why I should discard them.

But I’m not going to write them out right now! Ha ha! Maybe next post.

Instead, it’s time for some introspective bullshit that will bring this post to a lower standard than any that have come before. I have enclosed it in a cut to avoid offending your delicate sensibilities. Note that these thoughts were written shortly before I decided to give up on the whole “rational basis” thing, and may illustrate how I arrived at where I’m at philosophically right now. Or they may just serve to show how stupid I am! You decide.

I care what other people think about me, but it bothers me sometimes. I find myself imagining what both new acquaintances and nearest family think about me, my attitudes, and behavior. Does my father think I’m foolish? Do my friends find me annoying or rude? Why should I care? Obviously, I want people to like me so that they continue to spend time with me, so that I continue to benefit from their company. But there’s so much more baggage to it than that. Maybe it stems from a deep-seated need to avoid hypocrisy, and behave around others the way I would want them to behave around me.

I wonder how many people ever actually think deeply about things. I think it’s important to be self-aware. It bothers me when people aren’t. How many obvious thoughts have I myself missed, though? That is, am I really as self-aware as I could be? Are there qualities about myself that I’ve never noticed, or never will notice? Are there obvious contradictions in my belief structure (the little solid ground I have) to which I am blind? Why does it matter if I am wrong? I care about truth, “correctness” and “justice,” but sometimes wonder why. Why does it matter whether I am “right” about anything?

I feel like my belief structure is really fucked and self-contradictory, despite the fact that I am trying to unravel it. Sometimes it helps to start again from first principles and try to work your way upward, but it’s difficult when all your principles are of the form “if X then Y else Z.” What common results can be derived regardless of X’s truth?

Lastly, I give you a totally biased “Top Five” list, written at the same time as the introspective bullshit.

Top Five Absolutely Bizarre and Ludicrous Things that People Believe for No Good Reason

5. Obscenity : A term invented to label things we don’t like as “wrong” for no real reason other than that we don’t like them. This includes homosexuality, bestiality, incest, nudity, and even child pornography (it’s not that the pictures are “obscene” that should be bothering people; it’s only the fact that some child was presumably exploited/abused to pose for said pictures that should be criticized. And the ones who should be held accountable are the ones responsible for inducing the child, not those jerking off to the pics). Oh my God, protect the children!!! But why shouldn’t we expose children to these things? Maybe then they’d be reasonably desensitized to things like sex, enough so that people (including adults) can actually hold a fucking conversation about such topics without skirting or euphemizing or blushing. Note that #5 is really just a subset of #4, below.

4. Morality : Is murder always “bad”? By what standard can we logically say what’s right or wrong? Why can we kill animals but not humans? Why does killing something similar to us bother our conscience, but killing things different than ourselves does not? Could it be we are just aware enough to recognize that killing a monkey is a lot like killing us, and thus “wrong,” because we don’t want to be killed, but that killing a mosquito is ok because it’s somehow less valuable? Why are humans more important than anything else? Why is life more important than non-life? Morality is a farce. Humans are self-interested creatures, period. The moral structures we lay down serve only to protect our societies from individual conflicts of self-interest. Religion uses the most blatant scare tactics to affect people’s behavior. Heaven and hell are the carrot and whip, respectively. Other religions mandate certain behavior with enlightenment and the reincarnation cycle, or offer other spiritual rewards and punishments.

3. Karma : “People always get what they deserve.” Not only is this untrue, it is difficult to pin down what exactly it means for someone to “deserve” something. Of course, you can define it as “what they end up getting” and make the statement circularly true… Note that #3 is significantly related to #2, below.

2. Cause and effect : I.e., everything has a cause, reason or purpose. It is this crap that makes people invent constructs like a creator god. But who created God? “He’s self-created” and “he’s always existed” are standard responses–total bullshit answers that could be used to explain the universe itself rather than being applied to some second layer of abstraction.

1. Religion : I’m not even going to bother fully describing this one, as it would wear out my keyboard. I’ve already bitched about souls in a previous post, and various other aspects of religion. Note that #1 encompasses objections to both the “political” and “spiritual” spheres of religion.

You just gotta sit yourself down
To contemplate
You get yourself a nice cold beer
And drink yourself away
You’re celebrating nothing
And you feel a-okay
You’re celebrating nothing
And you feel a-okay

—Filter, “Welcome to the Fold”