the future-driven animal

Here's a thing I wrote the other day. Don't read too much into the darkness and bleakness of it. It was a day, a few hours, that's all.

THE FUTURE-DRIVEN ANIMAL

or 

WHY HUMANS SUCK

Life is a series of peaks and valleys: shit doesn’t always work out. All adults know this.

But what most of us refuse to face is that virtually every--no, not virtually, EVERY good experience we get to have, every person we love, every town to which we move with our big dreams (every single time, we’re so sweetly and pathetically absorbed in the feeling that THIS time damnit, moving will change everything! Of course it will!) every new job, every tiny slice of happiness we carve out of the shit and pain and nothingness that is this world--all of these are fiction.

And they will eventually let us down.

Capped off by the ultimate, final let-down: death.

For humans, all of our hopes, all of our LIVES are pinned on our imaginations, our stupid/smart goddamn human brains that lie to us constantly, telling us how great such-and-such is GOING to be, all the while subtly never letting us forget that by virtue of that thought, the present moment is, for some reason, not up to snuff. We would not otherwise spend nearly as much time fantasizing about how good these various mythical futures might be, would we, if we didn’t at least subconsciously see the present as so wanting. Otherwise why would our brains perpetually conjure them up?

We are the most ridiculous creatures of all: future-driven animals. Most animals are by necessity present-driven: what do I need right now? What do I want? There are more advanced species, besides us, that learn from the past: what should I avoid eating? Whom should I avoid pissing off? How should I prevent that bad experience from happening again.

But unlike any other animal on the planet in this regard, we humans are 90 percent focused on something that hasn’t happened yet, something that the odds--and, it would have been hoped, our big-ass brains--might have informed us may never happen. We don’t or won’t or can’t realize that the myriad futures we imagine are myths.

The future is something that quite literally does not, never has, and never will exist. It is only in your imagination. It is not a real place you can touch or see or quantify.

And if it is only in our imaginations, then it is false, and it merely serves to confuse.

The future is a lie, a shuck, a scam, a pitch sold by the best liar the world has ever known: the human brain.

We are, all our lives, subject to a series of emotional highs, all of which are pinned on hopes, all of which we know in our heart of hearts can never be reality. These hopes, these imagined moments are inevitably followed by disappointments and disillusionments when they don’t work out. Our dreams are not so much shattered as they are slowly, incrementally pecked away, worn down, made soggy, eroded, shaved off a bit at a time. They are made drab and lifeless on the heels of the initial Technicolor vibrancy they initially possessed when they first played out in our minds.

Our imaginations are too great; no one person and no experience can ever live up to the shows we put on in our heads. Everyone and every situation and every place must someday, at some point, disappoint.

This is the curse of humanity: we are all born dreamers who are doomed to have those dreams on which we rely rendered, eventually, gray and sad and banal and soft and moldy and rotten like old fruit.

We are creatures destined to be emptied, destined to be squeezed dry and drained of hope.

However, even without hope, we carry on. Disillusioned, we go forth, we plug away despite our despair--until the next lie strikes our fancy and we become dreamers again.

We are not the smartest animals on the planet.

We are, rather, the animals that should be most pitied.

Because we are not animals that are ever truly alive, not like the rest of them. In a way, unlike every other animal, we never really exist. We are never here, not really. We are ghosts living out our entire lives in dreams of tomorrows that will never come.

We live constantly in a future that can never be.

Thus, we never truly live.
###

we have failed

Here's part I of a rant that has been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks. Part II will be up in the next few days.

WE HAVE FAILED

We have failed.

We have failed as stewards of the planet, stewards of our own species, even as stewards of ourselves.

Without a doubt, the future--such as it may be--will judge us as the most short-sighted, selfish, and willfully ignorant people ever to walk the planet.

World War II gave us ‘The Greatest Generation.’

Perhaps the generation currently attending our severely under-funded schools will be known as ‘The Dumbest Generation.’

And mine will be ‘The Selfish Generation.’

If the species survives the next few hundred years--think about how we’ve been going in recent decades and reconsider that proposition soberly for a moment--the children of the future will certainly curse our greed and willful stupidity.

They will curse us, but only if there is any knowledge left of what has gone before--or indeed, any knowledge at all beyond the misinterpreted and misunderstood hand-me-downs of some ancient tribal peoples’ retrograde customs and laws.

The survivors will marvel at how foolish we were--that is, if they are not the benighted, reverse-Darwinian distillation of generations of the interbreeding of our dumbest, as seems likely given birthrate trends among religious fundamentalists versus the rest of the population.

[SIDEBAR: Imagine the resulting dull-witted species we might become as a result of centuries of fearful, superstitious, inbred rednecks seeking comfort in that which is the same while fearing The Different:

On the blistering, lifeless desert the planet becomes, they would mock as heretics any of their number who dare speak of ancient legends that tell of the lush, green Eden this place once was. They would shun education and reach instead for murky parables as retold by ignorant, millennia-dead herdsmen, unaware of the irony that it was their true-believer ancestors who finally succeeded in fulfilling their own ridiculous fables by remaking Earth into a blasted hellscape, all through their own stupidity and short-sightedness, all while chasing some dubious afterlife.]

But it must be said that all believers, irrational though they may be--the religious true believers, those who believe in some awakened Gaia taking charge, or those who believe in a benevolent alien race coming down to save us from ourselves--all of these demonstrate an unspoken truth: our species has an instinctive understanding that we are not capable of running the world.

We know this to be true, somewhere deep in the frightened, dark place inside our souls, though we are loath to admit it. We know we are ignorant, helpless creatures desperately in need of guidance.

We understand intuitively that we are too weak, stupid, and selfish to steward even our own petty desires and those of our fellows, much less the planet.

There are, as always, some choice examples of late to demonstrate this hypothesis.

Obviously, nowhere is our utter incompetence and failure to deal with the consequences of our bankrupt ideology better illustrated than in the current and ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. ‘Nuff said.

And the repercussions from our previous most recent failure to steward ourselves, others of our species, and the planet--that of the well-planned and well-abetted Wall Street shakedown of the economies of the entire world--are still being felt.

But another, less obvious example to which we can turn to illustrate our desperately misguided efforts to lead ourselves and each other is the Joran Van der Sloot case.

Take a look at this thick-skulled, meatheaded monster.




This dead-eyed, slope-headed beast, upon--apparently--getting away with murder once, largely as a result of having a wealthy and influential daddy, has now allegedly gone back to the well one too many times and confessed to another murder.

Now, I have never committed murder. Nor do I have any plans or desire to murder anyone, ever.

But if I had been involved, somehow, in some situation that had resulted in the death and/or disappearance of a girl I had been hanging out with, something that had exploded into a huge international manhunt and potential murder trial, and if I had sat in jail for three months during that investigation, AND IF, somehow, miraculously, I had been cleared of this crime, or at least gotten to go home and leave it behind me, I would be very very very fucking careful in the future, wouldn’t you?

Wouldn’t any sane person get down on their knees every day and offer thanks to Odin, Zeus, Jehova and any other deity they could think of that they had gotten away from this mess?

One would think, the second time around, some part of this creature had to know that what he was doing was wrong, and self-destructive, and other-destructive. One would think that, over the course of the Natalee Holloway investigation, he at least would come to some understanding of what ‘other-destructive’ meant to the rest of the world, if not within himself.

But he did it anyway.

Now look at these monsters.





The similarities to Van der Sloot are stronger than you might think. These creatures also were born of human families, raised with values and ideas similar to those we all hold dear.

But like Van der Sloot, they were all bent and twisted by unlimited privilege, unimaginable wealth, and a consequence-free existence. Their bubbles may have been temporarily dented by their culpability in the direct and indirect murder of others, but ultimately, they found that they got away with it (in Van der Sloot’s case, the first time, anyway.)

And all of these monsters have committed these crimes without blinking an eye or showing any overt twinge of conscience beyond the lip-service the 24-hour media machine requires.

What to make of that?


More to come...
Next up: a hypothesis.

religion rant 2

I think I have the swine flu. Or the Mexico flu, if you prefer that nomenclature for religious reasons.

(Sidebar: if the mere word ‘swine’ makes a strain of flu offensive, could a rabbi pray over the virus under a microscope in order to render it kosher? After all, it’s not actually a pig. Can a virus be slaughtered in such a way as to comport with Talmudic law? How about this: If an Orthodox Jew were to contract something called ‘swine flu,’ presumably against his will, does that mean he failed to keep kosher? Can Hindis get cow pox? These are the questions that torment me...)

I don’t really have swine flu. I just have an unholy capacity for poor decision-making. And an unquenchable thirst.

At any rate, I awoke today to find that the laundry I had put in the dryer last night was a lump of damp, probably mildewed fabric. No big. Call the landlord, get a number for a repair service.

So as I’m on hold with the company, listening to the endless blah blah blah of the ‘Your business is important to us,’ etc. message, I hear them insert this gem: (I am paraphrasing) ‘_____ Appliance Repair values its customers and serves God in the way we conduct our business. Have a blessed day.’

Really? Seriously? This small, and admittedly fairly unimportant moment brought home for me how widespread this is, all the businesses you see these days that have a Jesus fish conspicuously placed on their signs, or in their ads, or otherwise proclaiming something along the lines of ‘A Christian-owned business.’

It sticks in my craw.

Why would someone bring up the topic of God--in a recorded message, no less--when all I want is a working dryer? Does this mean that every single employee is a Christian? And, if so, how do they find that out when they conduct interviews? 'All right, Bill, your resume looks good, your references all check out. Now I’m just gonna need to see your penis. Checking for foreskin, don’t you know...’

At first glance such advertising seems relatively harmless. To my cynical mind, it might just be a cheap advertising ploy, an attempt to rope in the Christian dollar. It comes across as a way of saying, ‘One of Us!’

Or, to the less cynical, perhaps the people who run the business are simply happy and proud of having made their ‘decision for Christ,’ as Alec Baldwin’s delightfully odious character in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ put it.

But if you root around in the implications of choosing to advertise your business with reference to your religion, there are several problems. One is that Christ said (if you believe that such a person existed and that the people who wrote down what he supposedly said hundreds of years after the fact did so with any degree of accuracy):

"And when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to the Father which is in secret...."

There’s a teensy weensy problem of pride in these kinds of very public affirmations. And it is a particularly slithery, sinuous pride: it’s someone being proud of being so very humble. ‘Look at me! I’ve given my life over to The Lord ®!’ There’s a smugness, a passive-aggressive hostility to such declarations in the form of bumper stickers and magnetic fish that is bad enough on a personal level. But to advertise a business with this attitude smacks of a dim certainty that not just you, but your BUSINESS has been Chosen.

Which leads to the second problem: the very mention of your religion in your business advertising suggests an association between the way you make your money--a venal, mundane, and very earthly activity--with something divine and transcendent. Even if I were a Christian, I would find this offensive.

ESPECIALLY if I were a Christian.

Do you think your God gives a flying shit where I buy eggs or shoes or insulation? Is He really that petty? It’s the same concept as a football player dropping to his knees and ‘giving thanks’ after scoring a touchdown. If there were something as grand and omniscient as the God in which the religious would have us believe, He surely has better things to worry about than sports or where you buy caulk. You cheapen your own faith by suggesting otherwise.

Third, there is an implication that, because the people running the business are Christians, we should choose them over others who are not. Presumably, this means that as Christians who are ‘serving God’ somehow in the process of selling hammers or hot dogs, they are more trustworthy than others who are not Christians. The plain implication is that you, as a good Christian, should shop at Christian-run stores. But the unspoken converse of this is that you should NOT shop at a store run by Jews or Muslims or pagans or atheists. It implies that such people are untrustworthy or otherwise not good enough for you to do business with them.

The smug, mindless sense of Christians having superior morals to everyone else is something that demands to be examined, deconstructed and questioned at every turn. Examples abound.

Okay, granted, maybe I’m reading too much into this. And, too, I’ve been reading a ton of atheist manifestos recently, so these thoughts are in the forefront of my mind.

Never fear: I haven’t been ‘converted’ by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens or Harris. I converted on my own a long time ago.

Religion is like seeing a good magician: you know something isn’t right, you can sense that something's crooked, that there is a trick you’re missing, but you just can’t put your finger on it. You can’t get away from the uneasy sense that you are being hustled. Perhaps that’s why the notion of faith figures so prominently.

The fact is that we literally have no idea how much of this sort of nonsense--destructive, divisive nonsense--is woven into American society. The assumptions we make and they very way we think and see the world are so imbued with religion--Christianity in particular--as to make us blind to it, and to the messages it really implies. To borrow an image from Joe Bageant, trying to understand religion for modern Americans is like fish trying to understand water. It is the very medium in which we swim.

And that’s what makes it so important that we come up for air whenever possible.

###