Thursday, October 21, 2010

Cowardice: a logical point of view

Pessimism, anxiety and fearfulness get a bad rap. The fact is that there are tons of things out there that can make your life bad and pretending that they don’t exist or won’t happen to you is just naive. It’s best not to live in naivety. So, yes, being a pussy is sometimes a practical way of dealing with life. Not necessarily the best way, but there are good reasons that people live in cowardice. Let’s look at some of them.

1) Death- It's going to happen no matter what 
All kinds of things in life can happen to you. May happen to you. You may get cancer. Your plane may be hijacked by terrorists. You may live long enough to see your youthful looks fade. You may lose all your money and wind up living on the street. They are all possible. This one, though, this one comes to everybody and you can't run, you can't bribe your way out, you can't do anything to change it's mind. The sheer certainty of it, is what makes it more important than anything else you fear. Your whole life, every second, every problem, every good thing, all of it has to be taken with this in the back of your mind. You are here, you are reading this, and just as surely, you will be a memory soon enough, dead meat to rot or burn.

2) Tomorrow- Nobody knows for certain 
It's an unknown factor. In fact, it's the ultimate unknown factor. No amount of intelligence or computer power can solve the riddle of the day after this. We are all agnostics here. We think it's possible but we cannot be certain. It's like reaching down into a dark hole where something bad might live. You know that you will feel things tomorrow, euphoria, disappointment, maybe horror, but you don't know which. If the unknown is scary then when you wake up in the morning you should be terrified. You choose to hope for the best, you choose to think that it will be like every other day, but you don't really know. If you are smart you will make that same choice for all the things that scare you.

3) The police- They can kill you
Think about it this way: they are armed, are held to a different standard when it comes to killing people, are not chosen for their smarts, and most people trust them. Change the meaningless word "police"  the equally vague "gang" and you will see what I mean. An armed gang patrolling your streets at night, looking for a reason to stop somebody and take their money or to torture and kill them. Only morons believe that they actually have to do something wrong to get in trouble. Human beings are random, subject to error, prejudice and emotion but these are armed and have the authority to make your life miserable.

4) Rich people- Another set of rules 
The fact that a rich person can do the same things that a poor person can do is an accepted part of life. Everybody sees the bias, nobody cares, they just want to be rich too so that they can take advantage of the status quo. Some rich kid driving drunk could run into you tonight in his 350z  and never have to suffer a moment's discomfort. The newspapers and TV stations wouldn't cover it, and the district attorney would not ask for any kind of serious punishment. That's just the way it is and has always been. You live at their mercy. Just be happy they have not taken to openly hunting the rest of us for sport.

5) Food- There is something wrong with all of it 
It's either too fatty or lacking in something. Everything you enjoy will kill you and/or make you poor if you eat as much of it as you want. What you can afford is mediocre, but you need it so you buy it anyway. You are dependent on eating. You have to acquire food or you die. It's like a drug for which there is no rehab, to which you are bound by the chains of being human. You are stuck in addiction until you die.  Grocery stores are just dealers, restaurants are like shooting galleries where you go to get your "high".

6) Women- Fickle, dangerous 
Do you have any idea how different they are from us? If you are a straight guy you are stuck to them forever, forever interested, forever loving of vaginas and breasts and moans in the night. And yet they are so different from us that they might be of another species altogether. You want extraterrestrials? You want to see some weird, surreal intelligent organism before you die? Check women out. Insecure, emotional, vicious, amoral, and yet incredibly attractive. You respect them as equals and yet you cannot stop thinking about their asses. You fall in love and your happiness is at their disposal.

7) Men- When will the posturing end? 
A creature completely obsessed with status, with domination, competition and thrusting their viewpoint on other by using whatever means are at hand. You have to work with them every day, assholes who bring their egos into every little discussion about everything. Minor office-tasks become territory to be pissed on, defended for no reason other than symbolism. Projecting status to the pack. Manhood comes with slavery to the penis, and a dumb trust in women no matter how cynical you imagine yourself to be. You always fall for it. Lucy and the football. Your dumb maleness keeps you kicking and falling and kicking and falling.

8) Popular religion- They will stop at nothing 
Nor would you if you believed that your eternity depend on you doing something weird. You can get people to reduce themselves to animals on national TV to win a few hundred thousand dollars. Promise an eternity free of suffering and you can pretty much get them to do anything depending on the strength of their belief. Imagine an army of soldiers who would do anything they were told to with no hesitation and passionately, as if they had a personal stake in the outcome.

9) Kids- Annoying parasites 
While they are still children they have little of importance to think or to say, but they don't know that. They think that everything that passes through their mind is as new to you as it is to them. Some never grow out of the habit, never acquire a sense of not being smart or important. They are greedy, wanting everything while having no sense whatsoever of the value of money or the ignorance of youth until they have lost both. You think that being yours, having your genes makes them special, and maybe they are to your ego, but the pragmatic part of you sees that you just burdened the world with more average assholes.

10) Aging- It's like a disease 
Time's sewing machine embroiders death in your flesh. Every morning you wake up and look at the mirror something has changed you lost another day, another day that you won't ever be able to use, that you wasted doing something to make somebody else rich. You also died a little. Lost something that you won't have to day, a little quickness in your step, perhaps, ease of breathing, some little imperceptible thing is gone forever every 24 hours. Your wrinkles and your birthdays are like signs of how little you have gotten done, how much time you have wasted.

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