The following was an email that I typed out after a friend told me to try out typing something in one go without pausing to think too much or worry about the formatting. So, I just typed and hit send.
The world is a fucking absurd place. Absurd not in the sense that I expected it to be ordered and it surprises me that it is random. But that would be a lie, because, I probably subconsciously expect it to conform to some model that I have in my head for the world. When there are conflicts with this model, it suddenly seems like the world is bewildering or confusing.
Why do people need psychological crutches? Is it because we are social creatures that we need to reach out to other people for support? What about people who are perfectly fine with a divine crutch? Does the divine crutch somehow make them less in need of a social support group? How do we end up with these expectations?
Children are shown a fantasy future. They are told that they can make it in life if only they were to complete certain milestones. If they get through school with good grades, they can get into a professional course in some college. If they make good grades there, they can get a well paying job. If they just grit their teeth between 9-5 they can make a good pay and also earn the annual bonus and promotions. They can then be able to buy a house, a car and get married and settle down. They can have children, preferably two. Their children should then be sent to the best schools in the city so that the cycle can perpetuate forever and ever more.
Why?
Who created this fantasy? This model of a perfect life? If our lives were to conform to this model very closely, does that ensure fulfillment? What is fulfillment itself? To be fulfilled, we should be capable of having desires, our own desires, or driving or motive force. The universe is an absurd place, it has no apparent reason for existing. But we always create our purposes. We awake in the morning everyday with a purpose in mind. A raison d'etre . We are purpose creating machines. But most of us are living lives in the pursuit of an ideal, an ideal that is the perfect model from the gaze of the Other, but how the hell are we going to reconcile that with our own desires? To be fulfilled means that we have certain desires of our own. And these desires are necessarily individual and unique. If not, then the ideal model would work for everyone. These individual and unique desires are the ones that make people suddenly quit a high paying job mid career and go off to hitch hike around the world. These are the desires and motive forces that should be encourages within us. These are the passions and ideas or models for our own existence that must be stoked and stoked until the embers are raging fires within us.
Okay, that was rather dramatic. Maybe, we don't need to stoke them into raging fires, but even small embers burn long and give lasting comfort over a long period of time. When we deny the existence of our own desires, we are trying to live our lives for the fulfillment of the Other's model of existence. But the Other does not even exist outside of us! The Other's model is just what we perceive it to be. Different cultures and societies may have different ideal models to live by. The same society may have multiple ideal models to live by. And the model that we choose to fulfill just happens to be our perception of what the ideal model of the Other is. Why go to such huge efforts to fulfill a fantasy that we ourselves create to delude ourselves into thinking that our own desires do not matter?
Critically thinking about something as fundamental as the philosophy or the model by which we live our lives is something that everyone should do often. We probably do do it quite often. I'm sure that most people do think about how their actions or decisions may be viewed by others. The "conscience" is an attempt to view ourselves from outside us, to judge our actions in the context of its effect on others and ourselves. But we take important decisions in our lives with too much weightage being given to the ideal model and too little being given to our own desires or passions. If we consider doing something that would fulfill ourselves and if that something is far from the ideal model, then we immediately dismiss the thought as crazy! As something only fringe elements in society do, the weirdos who throw away all their possessions and go mountain climbing and hitch hiking.
But the cranks have been the ones to give spark to life and society. The cranks have been the ones to make life worth living. Imagine a society with everyone living their lives earnestly attempting to conform to the ideal model. Everyone doing exactly what they should. Where does that leave us with the individual? Where does that leave us with free will? Do people exercise their "free will" to the extent that they are capable of? What if everyone decided to suddenly do so, and do all the crazy things that they have always deeply desired? What would happen to society? Would we be left with utter chaos and anarchy? Is this why we have been naturally selected to maintain an evolutionarily stable ratio of cranks to the conforming people? When viewed in that sense, then cranks are just the lucky few genes which happened to exist because of a happy accident that their fraction of existence is supported by natural selection. Shouldn't cranks then stop giving out clarion calls to the world to stop being blind followers or conformists? Because cranks themselves only exist because the other fraction of conformists also exist, they balance and maintain the equilibrium. Cranks and geniuses should then be thankful of their happy accident of birth. They should then be uninhibitedly crazy. They should without any guilt pursue their dreams and passions and not worry about whether they are contributing to society in a productive way. They should go about their lives without any qualms, simply be as quirky as their happy circumstances (I say circumstances because its obviously not just genes that make you a crank or genius) made them.
The world is a fucking absurd place. Absurd not in the sense that I expected it to be ordered and it surprises me that it is random. But that would be a lie, because, I probably subconsciously expect it to conform to some model that I have in my head for the world. When there are conflicts with this model, it suddenly seems like the world is bewildering or confusing.
Why do people need psychological crutches? Is it because we are social creatures that we need to reach out to other people for support? What about people who are perfectly fine with a divine crutch? Does the divine crutch somehow make them less in need of a social support group? How do we end up with these expectations?
Children are shown a fantasy future. They are told that they can make it in life if only they were to complete certain milestones. If they get through school with good grades, they can get into a professional course in some college. If they make good grades there, they can get a well paying job. If they just grit their teeth between 9-5 they can make a good pay and also earn the annual bonus and promotions. They can then be able to buy a house, a car and get married and settle down. They can have children, preferably two. Their children should then be sent to the best schools in the city so that the cycle can perpetuate forever and ever more.
Why?
Who created this fantasy? This model of a perfect life? If our lives were to conform to this model very closely, does that ensure fulfillment? What is fulfillment itself? To be fulfilled, we should be capable of having desires, our own desires, or driving or motive force. The universe is an absurd place, it has no apparent reason for existing. But we always create our purposes. We awake in the morning everyday with a purpose in mind. A raison d'etre . We are purpose creating machines. But most of us are living lives in the pursuit of an ideal, an ideal that is the perfect model from the gaze of the Other, but how the hell are we going to reconcile that with our own desires? To be fulfilled means that we have certain desires of our own. And these desires are necessarily individual and unique. If not, then the ideal model would work for everyone. These individual and unique desires are the ones that make people suddenly quit a high paying job mid career and go off to hitch hike around the world. These are the desires and motive forces that should be encourages within us. These are the passions and ideas or models for our own existence that must be stoked and stoked until the embers are raging fires within us.
Okay, that was rather dramatic. Maybe, we don't need to stoke them into raging fires, but even small embers burn long and give lasting comfort over a long period of time. When we deny the existence of our own desires, we are trying to live our lives for the fulfillment of the Other's model of existence. But the Other does not even exist outside of us! The Other's model is just what we perceive it to be. Different cultures and societies may have different ideal models to live by. The same society may have multiple ideal models to live by. And the model that we choose to fulfill just happens to be our perception of what the ideal model of the Other is. Why go to such huge efforts to fulfill a fantasy that we ourselves create to delude ourselves into thinking that our own desires do not matter?
Critically thinking about something as fundamental as the philosophy or the model by which we live our lives is something that everyone should do often. We probably do do it quite often. I'm sure that most people do think about how their actions or decisions may be viewed by others. The "conscience" is an attempt to view ourselves from outside us, to judge our actions in the context of its effect on others and ourselves. But we take important decisions in our lives with too much weightage being given to the ideal model and too little being given to our own desires or passions. If we consider doing something that would fulfill ourselves and if that something is far from the ideal model, then we immediately dismiss the thought as crazy! As something only fringe elements in society do, the weirdos who throw away all their possessions and go mountain climbing and hitch hiking.
But the cranks have been the ones to give spark to life and society. The cranks have been the ones to make life worth living. Imagine a society with everyone living their lives earnestly attempting to conform to the ideal model. Everyone doing exactly what they should. Where does that leave us with the individual? Where does that leave us with free will? Do people exercise their "free will" to the extent that they are capable of? What if everyone decided to suddenly do so, and do all the crazy things that they have always deeply desired? What would happen to society? Would we be left with utter chaos and anarchy? Is this why we have been naturally selected to maintain an evolutionarily stable ratio of cranks to the conforming people? When viewed in that sense, then cranks are just the lucky few genes which happened to exist because of a happy accident that their fraction of existence is supported by natural selection. Shouldn't cranks then stop giving out clarion calls to the world to stop being blind followers or conformists? Because cranks themselves only exist because the other fraction of conformists also exist, they balance and maintain the equilibrium. Cranks and geniuses should then be thankful of their happy accident of birth. They should then be uninhibitedly crazy. They should without any guilt pursue their dreams and passions and not worry about whether they are contributing to society in a productive way. They should go about their lives without any qualms, simply be as quirky as their happy circumstances (I say circumstances because its obviously not just genes that make you a crank or genius) made them.
1 comment:
What a stretch!
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