Warning!

This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Have I Found Myself Lost?

Damn, it's been a long time since I updated here. My blogger instincts, nascent as they were in the first place, have still managed to atrophy. There has been a lot of not-very-significant change in my life recently, and it's hard to sort out what is worth talking about. Still, I feel a need to try, so instead of completing one of the several drafts that I have laying around which I've never actually published, I'll write a whole new entry developed from a single paragraph I wrote in frustration at work.

The drum I've been marching to lately has been a sense of profound disgust and dissatisfaction with the nature of our very reality. Everywhere around me I see evidence of how fundamentally flawed human psychology is, and how many wrong decisions people have made in the dim past and then continued to uphold as valuable cultural traditions. These frustrations have come out in my work life and have pushed me to the edge of losing my job - that I dislike my job intensely on a number of levels means that in a way I almost want to lose it, yet in a much more immediate and practical way, doing so would be suicidal, as the economy's ruined state means that a person of my sort cannot count on ever being able to sell his rather inspecific skills when he can't be humble enough to beg the approval of an employer. And so my frustration festers, having no healthy outlet and a disastrous surfeit of unhealthy ones, of which this blog is one of the least unhealthy and thus one of the easiest ones to forget. Such is the Ouroborean nature of our world's torment of us.

Still, I refuse to give up hope. Though the Earth may seem ruled by a tyrant God who cares only that he is obeyed, though the Adversary seems to have warped the very processes of life in order to make the most horrifying parasites and predators also the greatest evolutionary successes, though we seem guranteed to be devalued as human beings, considered entitled to neither the basics of life nor the mercy of death but prisoned forever in a parody of discomfort and slow decrepitude, thus that actual agony and horror is actually preferable just for its novelty...still I have the gall to believe that our world can be saved, that we do not need to accept that misery is our only lot. I read a couple Cracked.com articles on anger management and the fragility of the Internet recently, and recognized that they were like warning signs to my embattled perspective; they've diminished my sense of needing to fight back against the injustice I see all around me, but not by much. And so still I find myself writing, and wishing to publicize, sayings such as this:

"There can be no higher authority than the judgment of a wise person in matters of his own responsibility. Crime is a consequence of failure to understand the consequences of your actions; no one would ever commit a crime if we were all wise, and causing us all to be wise is much more worthwhile than forbidding us all from crimes, as such forbiddance cannot be perfectly enforced. The only way human beings can be trusted to do the right thing is if they are given the ability to determine it absolutely, and then allowed to self-motivate in its pursuit. No one can force us to do the right thing; they can only empower us to perceive it and trust that we know what's good for us."

Perhaps I'm not being very objective, but as I look upon these words I wrote three days ago, the very day that I was given a final "toe the line or else" warning at my job, I find that they still seem profound and meaningful. Why is it that, when a man like me pens a commandment like this, people do not abandon their obviously-dysfunctional way of life in order to try out the new way? Why do we continue to obey laws which we know are obsolete, work at jobs we consider pointless, vote for politicians we know are only out to line their pockets at our expense, and then obediently do whatever someone tells us when they put a gun to our head in order to force us to betray our principles? Why is it so impossible for people to behave as beings of higher reason, instead of as spastic animals who hate their lives yet would do anything to avoid dying?

I can see so many clearly-correct solutions to the world's problems, and all they would require is one tiny miracle to make them work. Could we not conjure that miracle if we directed our will in sufficient numbers? How many people must refuse to fear the gun before they actually become bulletproof? Why is it that everyone sells out, when no-one selling out would render money powerless to enslave us? Why do people cling foolishly to the words of long-dead prophets, willing to kill their neighbor over a differing interpretation of just one word in their holy book? It is easy to look at these tragic paradoxes and believe that we are doomed, that this world's nature is atrocity and that all hope is false. Yet I cannot make myself believe this. I still nurture the flame of Hope within me...and I still believe that if enough other people would feed me the fuel for that spark, or at least stop standing between me and a forest I can set alight, that I could still be our Lightbringer, and free us from the chains of our intolerable universe.

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