I’ve never liked self-help books. So many of them peddle a naive optimism that asks one to pull happiness out of thin air. You could call it crypto-Christianity as seen via Nietzsche’s rendering of Judeo-Christian philosophies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” He called the principle the inversion of values,  which he said made the religion anti-life. This point is illustrated effectively in the promise of an afterlife. To get a reward one first has to die. The enjoyment of life is irrelevant, if not a hindrance to this promised eternity. But the philosopher did effectively put misery on a pedestal himself, though for reasons concurrent with life. He wished nothing but strife on those he loved. It makes them stronger, he contended.

But, much as the Judeo-Christian view defers the benefits of one’s suffering to a hereafter, Nietzsche makes the assumption that strength of character is inherently valuable. He emphasizes misery as an investment in one’s will, but the unspoken sacrifice is happiness and joy. Which is to say the point of life is to become desensitized, to brace for the eventual storm. If one can ask what the value of pain and sacrifice is if there is indeed nothing waiting beyond death, one can ask the same question regarding the turmoil of life itself if one’s focus narrows the coming horror. In either case, one has willingly sacrificed their enjoyment of life for an expectation (one probable but depressing, and one encouraging but undemonstrated).

In practice, Christians rarely self-flagellate anymore, literally or figuratively, for the benefits promised beyond death. They do embrace happiness, sitting within the wide margins of scriptural interpretation. Likewise, Nietzsche advocated the celebration of life itself. He favored philosophies and religions that affirmed life rather than denigrating it.

Nietzsche’s description of views that celebrated poverty and misery over success and pleasure, or concepts that attempted to null the contrast between beneficial and harmful circumstances (e.g. nirvana), placed them under the banner of nihilism. Contrary to the clichéd misinterpretation that’s hounded Nietzsche in popular culture, he didn’t advocate nihilism. In his story of the madman, from which the famous paraphrase about God being dead originated, he observes a modern scientific world in which cause and effect are clearly seen. Without the necessity of superstition, supernatural ideas would become less relevant, relegated to vague symbolism; not the immediate practical functions they’d once served. People will irrigate their plots, not burn a lamb for spiritual favor.

In that world, where metaphysical ideas give way to physical ones, the afterlife comes into question, and with that, meaning itself. Whether there is a meaning to life, a point, a purpose. Is there some deliberate force behind the existence of a living planet, or is it simply an indifferent fluke? That’s the position one is faced with when one lets go of rewards and meaning in an ultimate sense. One is left to question the very value of life to a self-aware animal with apparent choices. Then one must look at things subjectively and try to determine what it is that drives them forward in a much more immediate sense. And one is alone with this decision.

Both concepts of nihilism intersect at the death of meaning. The religious view makes the qualitative differences between events and circumstances null as a deliberate discipline, and the other is an incidental consequence of following a thread of monist logic to its bitter end. In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche attempts to reconcile humanity with a rational sense of meaning by deliberately choosing to live, and to overcome one’s inherent weaknesses: things he characterized as useless and detrimental. Emotions like pity, which depress the person, while not fixing anything in itself. Taken as a literal whole, there are callous elements to his ideas, though the man himself, if it makes any difference, was not prone to cruelty. Before his health and mind mysteriously disintegrated, a famous story involved him intervening on behalf of a horse being beaten. Perhaps he was already unhinged by that point, so take it as you will.

Coming back to my original point, optimism and positive thinking share their underpinnings with the nihilistic tendencies described above. It, like the inversion of values, and the death of meaning, is a distortion of the natural impact of circumstances on the psyche. With the view that no event can be qualitatively bad, but instead offers some kind of lesson, or has happened for a reason, the distinction between good and bad events becomes unclear.

With real success, gain, and achievement, a sense of joy is — under most circumstances — completely inevitable. A smile crosses one’s face that couldn’t be straightened out if one wanted to! There’s no need to rationalize this kind of elation. There is no mindfuck at work here. Something qualitatively beneficial has happened, and every nerve and instinct rises to meet it. Certainly, one can become complacent, and the excitement of a victory, even if the spoils are kept, will wear off. Nicholas Taleb, in “Fooled By Randomness,” cited a study that had shown the psychological impact of even a minute beneficial change was greater than the maintenance of a more quantitatively substantial baseline. Seeing one’s bank account grow by a hundred bucks is delightful, even if one has maintained a healthy balance that happened to stagnate for some months.

There are events and circumstances that are simply bad, harmful, injurious. To tell oneself to feel good about them is to suppress a natural reaction. The instinct is there for a reason, so that an animal can survive by knowing what is beneficial and what is not. Just as an animal will ideally disregard its own shit in favor of a fresh, nutritious chunk of wildebeest. If an animal can convince itself everything smells appetizing, I don’t see how it really benefits the animal in the long run. To celebrate horror is to cheapen joy, as any philosophy that equates them through rationalizations will force them to meet in the middle.

The tentative conclusion I can draw from this exercise is that pain needn’t be sought, but is unavoidable and should be felt when appropriate. To acknowledge terrible things for what they are is honest and natural. The only real joy is the inevitable one that follows a qualitative gain.

If you spend an hour both ways in traffic, and work an average day, 65% of your waking hours are spent in the service of your employer. More, if you take your work home.

Of the time spent laboring at work — loosely 50% of your waking hours — on average, half of that will be compensated in proportion to your labor.

That means that 25% of your waking hours are spent laboring solely for the benefit of your employer.

Meanwhile, while they’re taking credit for half your work, and you’re wasting 25% of your waking hours for nothing, there is no guaranteed benefit to you based on the success of the company, which has benefitted from your labor.

If you choose to take a risk on starting your own business, you will go immediately into debt; meaning a negative balance from your business is guaranteed, and if you make any money a good chunk of that will go to paying debts. Half of all small businesses fail in their first year; 95% over the course of five years.

For a wage employee, the implications of this mean the difference between relative comfort and destitution. For those with existing capital, the risk is placed on disposable income. While the loss of their investment may be unpleasant, it is not devastating. They can take risks, and reap the rewards, precisely because their futures are assured. If their money is based on a trust or an inheritance, any notion that their wealth is in proportion to their contribution to society — or even their cunning — is void.

If they do make money, it will be at the expense of their employees, which they are paying half of what their time and work is worth. The employees, not having an investment in the company (having no capital to invest if they wanted to) will not benefit in proportion to the success for which they are responsible, except at the arbitrary discretion of their employers.

The carrot on the horizon is retirement at 65. The median life expectancy (based on variations in class and race) of an american male is about 75. The last ten years of your life will be your own; your youth will be gone, many friends will have died, and your children will have grown up and left. This is all assuming, of course, that you have a savings. And if you do, circumstances like illness could easily wipe that out.

The reason most people tolerate this disparity, and even admire their social betters, is because they all imagine themselves in that position. Despite the overwhelming improbability of it, they believe they will miraculously transcend their economic class.

The result of this is the rejection of policies that would directly benefit them, though to the slight and manageable detriment of the wealthy. A good example of this is the massive reduction in taxes on the wealthy introduced by Reagan; undermining FDR’s policies which made the so-called “American Dream” — including home ownership, vacations, and retirement — attainable. Other examples include the subsidization of large corporations, for which the rich and poor are not paying proportional amounts in taxes. Lobbying by private businesses has made the will of the common person — 98% of the country’s biomass — irrelevant.

Policies such as free public healthcare could drastically reduce the number of deaths not prevented due to lack of health insurance; which currently stands at 20,000 annually. Not only could it help with urgent and costly medical needs — which throw those families permanently into debt when they couldn’t afford insurance in the first place — but such access would make preventative care feasible, thus reducing the number of illnesses that become critical (and expensive).

Americans spend little time thinking about, and even less doing something about, the fact that this government’s policies, which represent the interests of corporations, are actually responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and bankruptcies every year. They even cheer it on. It’s as though they’re approving of the inclusion of a single life raft on a ship carrying 400 passengers because they each think they’re going to be one of eight people that will be in it.

With inheritance, public subsidies (the bailout), college legacy programs, and cozy relationships with elected officials, the point of contention that makes economic disparities palatable for many Americans — the idea that wealth is always proportional to merit, the basis of laissez faire and free market rhetoric — is fraudulent.

This raises the question of the purpose of an economic system, and for that matter the purpose of a society. The current economic and political systems aren’t the only kind that could have been instituted. If one’s priorities are increasing the margin between the fortunate few and the moribund masses, then the current policies make complete sense. The logic behind what’s essentially a serf being rabidly in support of this eludes me. Businesses like co-ops, where the risks and rewards of shared among the actual laborers, make much more sense to me. A system that places priority on the health and well being of the populace makes sense to me.

ONE

Introduction

Pride in one’s species is rather provincial, don’t you think? Every species that’s ever developed self awareness must have seen it as an evolutionary culmination, rather than one of many possible, but not inevitable, courses; of which the implications are still not known, and never will be known.

The only definitive answer is failure, because it’s an end. By contrast, there’s no ultimate success. Just a tentative ongoing trial of one’s ability to survive: a wait for the other shoe to drop. What is the measure of success in a species? reproductive? technological? cultural? Species not even dimly aware of themselves, driven only by instinct — bundles of nerves and the muscles that respond directly to the stimuli received — have nevertheless survived for eons. They’re neither happy nor sad, and will never build cathedrals or toaster ovens. They’ve done well without developing a sense of self, for there was never a force strong enough to unsettle them from their niches.

Nothing — the predators, the elements, wars with other colonies or similar species, and all of the myriad parasites and microbes — could interrupt the continuity of their lineage. Highways of crocodiles, rivers of beetles, torrents of cockroaches, oceans of bacteria, have all found satisfaction with their trades, even if they know of no alternative — and lack any conscious sense of what they do now.

What if all self awareness does is make one realize their inextricable role in something that could just as well have continued without it? What happens when the ingenuity of abstract thought is no longer engaged by the urgency to find novel ways of survival? What happens then?

TWO

Evolution Towards Perfection

To the development of the species, we have an ideal in mind. It’s often just a vague intensification of western progressive culture, flattened, homogenized, and turned inward until it’s reimagined — not as one of many courses of the tangential, random development of a culture, but as an inevitable point in the perfection of human relations and physiology. This benefits the culture itself; to justify a pattern of useful traditions and ideas that served some practical purpose. Most people live in a realm of imagined potentialities and ideals, not the ongoing realities and the cyclical events which preceded them. Their morality is not what they do, but what they believe in. Their society isn’t what’s before them, but what they hope it will be. It’s both an explicit reaction to perceived shortcomings in a society, and a tacit endorsement of aspects taken for granted as obvious.

Perfection as an ideal assumes such a culture can exist objectively, and that the idea is even meaningful or coherent. But, how does one chart, say, the course from primordial grunts to a versatile language, and prove objectively that one is more perfect than the next? More accurate words? Nicer sounding phonemes? We have to answer by whose account it’s better. There are a ton of qualitative differences one can point out legitimately, but you’re ultimately left with a loose end; that you have to make the subjective choice of what you value, and admit that it’s only within that framework that something more abstract than survival becomes meaningful.

You can roll the historical dice until the cows come home, but you won’t end up with a sequence of events identical to that which developed the cultures we know. We are doing things this way, but we could just as easily be doing something else, and we wouldn’t know any better. Where progress in western culture is often seen as an advance toward tolerance and intellectualism (for liberals, anyway), there are other cultures (or subcultures) that admit entirely different ideals; like piety, class distinction, hierarchical family structure. They continue in spite of seeming backward to western progressives because enough people within these respective societies are either adequately satisfied with them, or cowed by them, so that they don’t bother advocating change, or they hold tenaciously to traditions they hope to keep ad infinitum.

There are a lot of practices that don’t translate across cultures, that each sees in the other as barbaric or profane. But since it’s only a comparison between one culture’s values and another, and not an absolute benchmark, the variation illustrates that the outcome of cultural development is rather arbitrary. An individual’s right not to be the property of another, for instance, isn’t universal. For it to become barbaric to own another person, one must first decide — consciously or not, individually or across the history of a society — that individual freedoms are important. Not everyone agrees. Without a universal arbiter of cultural absolutes, one is stuck with the awareness that, aside from the physiological demands that motivate and loosely direct them, the values we see as essential and obvious are ultimately indefensible objectively. Gods, and their ultimate judgments, are a convenient way to shut down the discussion, but it’s plain that their invocation just legitimizes a culture’s traditions without explanation.

This raises the question of whether there’s a determining factor beyond opinion to which one can defer as a guideline. A fundamental basis of modern western society, for instance, is the individual’s right to self-determination. A person could not legitimately be owned by another, and a person should be able to pursue their desires to the extent that they don’t infringe on the said freedom of another (ideally, in theory). Again, the view is a choice, not an evolutionarily determined absolute. It may have come about because it serves the species in general, but there are other ideas that might have done as well or better.

It’s assumed that we’ll inevitably become more civilized, more genteel, more intellectual: that our physiology will direct itself toward our vanities, and beyond its current weaknesses and mediocrities. Nothing suggests that this assumption is justified. Evolution isn’t a constant progression toward someone’s subjective ideal, but the adaptation to environmental pressures. Features appear randomly through mutation, and more often than not they’re a hindrance to survival. It’s only when animals of a species sharing specific genetic traits die, or otherwise fail to contribute to the gene pool, that the remaining animals that survive and produce offspring see their own successful features propagated and amplified.

If human ingenuity has circumvented the factors leading to natural selection for fitness, and adaptation to a natural environment, faster than it has been able to artificially correct harmful genetic mutations, then the contribution of these frailties affects the species as a whole. To the extent that humanity has made natural environmental pressures (natural culling) irrelevant, it must do two things: find a way to alter itself physiologically according to its own ideals (e.g. the correction of genetic diseases; but there are other more controversial elective alterations as well), and find a state of equilibrium for the controlled environment on which it depends. One that can be sustained according to the needs of the species (and any other species necessary to this environment). If either the genetic makeup of the species becomes too mediocre by the lack of environmental pressures, or the environment reverts to a state that abruptly reintroduces such pressures, the position of the species will become tenuous.

In other words, many of us would not survive as wild animals. Whether we like it or not, we’re conditioned to live in the world which we currently do, though factors like pollution have outpaced our ability to compensate genetically.

THREE

The Meaning of Life

Dualism supposes that the mind/soul/consciousness and the physical body are somehow separate and extricable entities. In this scenario, everyone you’ve known still exists somehow, and so their thoughts, experiences, feelings, and perhaps even their ongoing companionship, are maintained. The prospect of second chances, or a purer existence liberated from illness, circumstances, and vice, are also appealing. But the appeal of something doesn’t influence its veracity. The model of the brain as the home of the mind has far more evidence than the nevertheless widely accepted idea of the soul.

If you abandon the idea of dualism, any reference to the dead in the present tense becomes meaningless; as does any reference to oneself beyond death. You/they no longer exist physically, and so everything that distinguished yourself/them from inanimate debris is permanently gone.

Monists wanting meaning sometimes find it in the thought that they will live on in the memories of the people they’ve affected in their lives. But this thought is only a comfort until the moment the lights go out. The entire experience ends. It’s an asymmetrical prospect; you won’t be aware of someone remembering you because “you” no longer exist. The memories themselves are stagnate; a fetish slowly distorting, and ultimately fading from existence. All of your contemporaries will also die, and with them will go any direct memories of you.

If you’ve left a mark on the world, your work will continue to exist. But again, “you” won’t, so it’s only a thought to make the inevitable and permanent condition seem less grim as you advance toward it.

For both dualists and monists, it’s the continuation of one’s existence — literally for dualists, and figuratively/symbolically for monists — that provides comfort. Perhaps it emerges from the microcosm of our genes which, albeit unconsciously, make every effort through their particular species/vehicles to continue their own existence. From the first self-replicating molecule, to the single-celled organism, to every animal on earth which would evolve from this common ancestor, all have the same goal: to multiply, assuring the gene’s continued existence. Goal is the wrong word. Even compulsion is wrong. It’s just a physically determined inevitability. Particle A crashing into particle B, according to physical principles, reacting to motions and trajectories already in place since moment zero.

I don’t know what “meaning” means to the individual. Self awareness would seem to have come about as all features of life do: random mutations that proved useful in our survival and propagation. A happenstance that serves our masters, the genes, and produces the subject: the animal aware of what it is and what it’s doing, so that it can do it better. But with self awareness being an emergent quality of complex organisms, and cells being mindless little machines, made of big molecules we call DNA, there’s no room for deliberate intent at that level. We are made of our “creators,” and they don’t give a shit. They’re not capable of giving a shit.

Most of us are compelled to serve our masters’ will: survival, dominance, reproduction. Aside from the other two, dominance is important because genes don’t just “want” to survive in general, each “wants” to survive to the exclusion of others (a motive we often consciously mitigate or deny). Beyond serving that end, it would seem that self awareness is what engineers call “feature creep,” a gimmick with a lot of superfluous features.

Like looking for meaning.

FOUR

Summary

We’ve established, by the existence of evolutionarily stagnate creatures, like the tiger shark and the dung beetle, that evolution toward self awareness is not inevitable with time; nor is it necessary to the survival of most species.

The human evolution of self awareness and the capacity for abstract thought came about randomly, and held because it helped the species survive.

The capacity for self awareness and abstract thought are not going to improve over time without outside pressures killing off all but those with the most pronounced of those qualities.

Cultural evolution is arbitrary, subjective, and not guaranteed to improve over time. Improvement itself also being subjective.

Self awareness and abstract thought have helped the survival of the species, but don’t exist toward an end beyond the will of mindless genes. This leaves us with an overdeveloped capacity to question our roles in a purpose simple enough to be dealt with, thoughtlessly, by marmots and weevils.

The value of the mind can only be subjectively weighed by the mind itself. Which is a conflict of interest.