Warning!

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

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Fuck You, Darwin

I've always hated strong people. My mom is a strong woman, and I hate her. I love her too, don't get me wrong; those two are not mutually exclusive like a lot of you have been taught. I love her for a lot of things about her that are good, but her capacity to be an unstoppable juggernaut who knocks down anything and everything in her path, stops at nothing to achieve her goal, is something I've always hated. She never accepts that she's beaten, just like me, but she doesn't settle for sitting around and fuming and wishing things could be different; she changes things, even if the only change she can make is for the worse. That's called strength, and I hate it.

I choose to be weak. I choose to do nothing rather than the wrong thing, and I believe that choice makes me noble. If you don't agree with that, then fine, that's you're right - and also fuck you for feeling that way, that's my purely personal response. You have every right to feel that way, and I objectively accept that; subjectively, I hate you for it. I hate a lot of things; we need more hate in the world.

You always hear about what a bad thing hate is, but it's not hate that is a problem, it's acting on hate. If you just don't like people of Type X, nobody gives a shit; you have every right to hate them for any reason or no reason. It's only a problem if you treat them poorly because of it. Your thoughts are your own, and they're wonderful no matter what they are; your actions are the part that needs accountability, the part where you have to be reasonable to others. Hate them all you like as long as you don't do anything about it.

We need more people willing to not do anything. I never want to do anything, and I hate myself about it. Hating yourself is a good thing, it makes you a little better prepared to deal with other people hating you. It's good practice. Thicken your skin, grow a spine, accept the hate and make it a part of you. Love your hate, and love yourself for being hateful. That's the answer right there.

Oh, and while we're talking about self-contradicting statements, here's another one, from 1984: Freedom is Slavery. That one's bullshit of course, but right under it is another one: Ignorance is Strength. That one's true, and you can find plenty of proof. Look at a lynch mob, or a stampede of frenzied bulls. Strong, and ignorant. If they took time to figure out what they were doing, they'd stop doing it, but then they'd be weak. Stopping and thinking is weakness; after all, strength is the capacity to exert force, and you can exert a lot more force if you don't care what you're exerting it on. You can drive faster if you don't watch where you're going, and that reckless speed makes you very good at smashing things that get in your way, like the aforementioned frenzied bulls. We need more weakness in this world. It shouldn't be the strong that survive, because they usually don't deserve to.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

The Virtue of Omniscience

I have long believed in many notions that seem absurd to the conventional thinker, but which I feel to be fundamentally right on a deep, instinctive level. Here is one example.

It is always preferable that everyone should know everything. For instance, if someone knows exactly how to break into my house without being caught, and I know exactly how to catch him anyway and stop him without breaking a sweat, it's preferable to neither of us knowing those things. If someone knows my bank account password, that is fine as long as the bank knows that the person using my bank account password is not really me, and I know who the person trying to break into my account is, and that they have failed and where exactly they are, even why they were doing it. Maybe they legitimately need the money more than I do, and I know how to call the bank and let them know to allow them to get the money, and I'll know if they spend it for any other purpose. If you know how to destroy the world, you also know why you shouldn't (unless, factually and unarguably, you should, in which case you also know exactly what will happen after you destroy the world and why it is preferable to continued existence). An insane person knows he's insane, and knows how to be otherwise at any given moment; he doesn't use his knowledge in an insane way because he knows it would be insane to do so. You would even know how not to know a thing if you'd rather not know it, and you'd know that you opted not to know it and why, and could work around that knowledge as well as employ it.

Knowledge is only ever bad if it's inequitably distributed; we would all be best off having an infinite amount of it. The desire to keep secrets is a destructive twitch leftover from our caveman days, an irrational impulse that drives us to violence against those who breach our privacy rather than tolerate their knowledge of things which we feel shameful about. Fear, shame, wrath; they are all primitive emotions which omniscience would temporarily increase, only to eclipse and annihilate them in short order, leaving a world in which everyone is glad to be exactly what they are, and incapable of acting inappropriately (by a factual, not subjective and humanly flawed, definition of 'appropriate'). The faster we expand knowledge toward the infinite, the sooner we will begin to resemble the gods, who (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they do indeed exist) are omniscient and beyond our animal urges. Knowledge is literally what makes us divine, and so we should increase it ad infinitum.