Being Nice is Bullshit

Sep 7, 2014 //
0

There was once a man named Abraham Lincoln. Now, Lincoln is known for a few things, like abolishing slavery, owning dapper hats, and a posthumous distaste for the theatre, but one story that is slightly less known is that one day Abe and a buddy were riding in a carriage discussing altruism. Lincoln was saying that there is no such thing as a truly selfless act, and his buddy was saying, yeah bro, there is. All of a sudden the carriage came upon an adorable little pig stuck in some mud. Abraham Lincoln demanded the carriage driver stop, leaped out of the carriage with his coattails all a-flutter, rolled up his sleeves, and rescued the pig. Dusting himself off, Abe climbed back into the carriage. His buddy, triumphant, declared, “Saving that pig did not affect you in the slightest! That was a truly selfless act!” and Abraham Lincoln, being the wise-cracking mother fucker that he is, smirked and replied, “If I hadn’t saved that swine, it would have bothered me all day.”

Do I agree with good ol’ Honest Abe? That there is no such thing as a truly selfless act? No, I don’t. I’m using this story to illustrate the fact that people who do nice things for themselves are smug assholes.

Too often do I hear people say to do nice things, and nice things will happen to you. Or to do nice things because it’ll make you feel good. Or do nice things and people will finally respect you. These are the reasons that Abe Lincoln claimed that a truly selfless act is impossible. Doing nice things for personal gain or self-image doesn’t make you nice. It makes you a dink. You’re like those people who are always so God damned cheerful, but everybody knows that it’s just a ruse and they’re really a creep. Just because your actions might be considered nice or beneficial to others, it doesn’t make you a saint if your justifications are self-serving.

A Batman once said that it’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you. That may be how others will judge you, but it is not who you are. Your essence as a person is not based on the opinions of others, but on your consciousness alone. If the quality of that consciousness is based on self-serving motives, then regardless of how many pigs you save, you’re still kind of a twat.

The obvious alternative is to do nice things for other people. That is also stupid. There is no way to predict the outcome of a “nice” act, and so to rely on the reactions of other people to dictate the merit of an act will constantly vary. Did you ever give a gift you felt sure would make somebody happy, and have it rejected or met with apathy? It’s the thought that counts, right? The thought to do something nice for someone else? What good is a thought if everybody loses? An act cannot be judged based on its outcome because the outcome will never be known prior to the act itself.

So if the consequences of an act don’t define it, nor does its intent, the only thing left is the act itself.

But Dan, don’t actions lack any inherent value?

That is an excellent point, italicized text. We as subjects create the value for every single act, but that does not exclude the possibility of projecting that value outside of ourselves when it comes to morality. Therefore when we act, we do it not for ourselves or for others, but for the deed itself. This allows us to abstain from self-righteousness, as well as foregoing the risk of a moral quandary due to unanticipated consequences.

This does not mean that we are obligated to hold others to account under our morality, for it is still our own and will always be unique to us. Just because we project it outside of ourselves does not mean that we must forget its original source. Neither does this mean that absolutism is the answer, and projected morality does not have to be rigid, but can be just as fluid as the situation merits.

Hold on, so we’re just supposed to pretend that something that comes from within us is actually outside of us? How can a form of ethics be based on make believe? 

All forms of ethics are based on make believe. Ethics is impossible to nail down; hence why it’s one of my favourite things. This is just a theory of mine to prevent people from being terrible, and also to help them realize that deeds are not necessarily the only method of defining somebody’s character.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Philosophy

The Flawed Nature of Social Media Activism

Aug 29, 2014 //
3

What the Internet, and social media especially, has allowed us to do is to market ourselves more thoroughly than we’ve ever before been capable. This allows entrepreneurs to simply make a Facebook page, and all of a sudden they now have a free advertising space where they can post random shit about whatever it is that they do. Maybe they make aprons? Who knows. Anyway, it’s a sweet deal, let’s be honest. But what Facebook and other social media also does is turn individuals into brands. Not just the products and services that participate on social media, but people themselves sell their Self as a sociable human being. Have you ever lamented being tagged in a bad photograph? It’s bad publicity. I read an article that spoke about the implications of only seeing the happy, fun, exciting things that everybody seems to be doing on Facebook, and how that lie influenced people. We all have problems, and when we see how awesome everybody else’s life seems to be, we feel even worse. This is a bit of a tangent, but the relevance of the article is that everyone wants to project an image of themselves that is successful, fun, and adventurous, and hide any sort of distasteful aspects of themselves. We sell ourselves to the public, and we want them to buy into us.

When we realize that this is who we are in a social media setting, we realize that any sort of activism rings just as hollow as a mega-corporation donating a few bucks to a charity for the tax write-off. We are projecting the image of activism for the sake of our branding, and this leads to is what is sardonically called Slacktivism. Slacktivism is people who may genuinely care about things, but can’t actually be bothered to do anything tangible about them. So reposting a status update, or changing your profile picture for a day, or pretty much anything to do with “raising awareness” would fall under the blanket of Slacktivism. As you might be able to tell, this accomplishes nothing, but does give off airs of humanism to those who might be paying attention.

That isn’t to say the activism doesn’t sometimes sneak through every once in a while, but when it does, it is packaged in such a way as any other form of mass media drivel. Successful activism today must fit the same criteria as a Jimmy Fallon bit: easily digestible, bitesize, palatable content that is inoffensive and safe. It is activism you might find on a Buzzfeed page with a catchy title. This is the kind of activism where the gimmick is more popular than the cause. One such example is my most favourite thing in the world: Movember, but the most recent explosion of gimmicky activism is, of course, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

Don’t get me wrong. Having a charity drive for something other than the cancer of a private part is so God damned refreshing. And the number of lives that will be saved because of the millions upon millions of dollars being raised for an admittedly worthy cause is incalculable. So what am I griping about?

Let’s look at the Ice Bucket Challenge. Its success doesn’t come from the fact that Lou Gehrig’s Disease is a particularly prominent condition, as it is heart disease that afflicts most people in North America. Nor does its popularity stem from any kind of advertising campaign based on what ALS is:  its causes, its symptoms,  its treatments, or anything actually relevant to the disease itself. Its success comes from the fact that the gimmick associated with it is “fun”, its process is incredibly public, and celebrities are doing it. The cause itself is also a safe one, as no cultural norms need to be upheaved in order to cure a disease. It is a safe disease even, as heart disease would mean admitting that there is an epidemic of over-consumption in our culture.

Is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge about ALS, or is it about the person who is dumping ice water on themselves? Does it promote the cure for the disease, or the “charitable” nature of the the person participating in it? The cause or the brand?

Do the ends justify the means? Regardless of the method of raising money, there has been a significant charity drive for ALS. I’m sure a sufferer of this condition couldn’t give a fuck about what I think about the Ice Bucket Challenge, and honestly, more power to them. But what the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge means is that those causes that have a bit of an edge to them, that can’t fit into an easily-digestible 30 second video clip; those become even more difficult to market, as the market shifts towards the Social Media paradigm of harmless activism and status updates.

Were genuine, hard-hitting causes to show up in a Facebook newsfeed, not only would they be seen in the context of cute cat memes and travel pictures, but they would also be in the company of slacktivism and gimmicks that degrade the nature of progress.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Politics

Our Search for Primitivism

Aug 16, 2014 //
0

I believe in Western culture we have become disillusioned with modernity. Not just the postmodernists who have long since abandoned the structured lifestyles, rigid individualism, and scientific order that make up our contemporary society, but subconsciously I believe we all have some amount of disenchantment with where our culture has ended up. As an escape from our existential malaise, likely without even meaning to, we jettison ourselves, not into the future, but into the past; when we still maintained a connection with the world and with each other.

In Ancient Greece, there was the Cult of Dionysus. The purpose of this cult was to abandon all inhibitions, and revert back into a natural state. This was achieved by drinking a lot of wine and dancing to music. Dionysus himself, the god of wine, was imagined as a Satyr. A Satyr is man with goat legs and goat horns, and he has a big ol’ dick too. The Satyr was the inspiration for the imagery of the Christian devil, but more on that later.

These were not rambunctious parties, where getting shit-faced and plowing some broad were the expected culmination of these events, but were ritualistic, religious experiences. They are often called the Dionysian Mysteries, as they were secretive events, where one had to go through an initiation in order to partake in the ritual. The point was to lose yourself; to release your soul from the material world, and reunite with the spirit.

As anyone with a passing disdain for Christianity will tell you, the proliferation of Christianity ruined the enlightenment that the Greeks had given to the world. Unfortunately for them, it was really the Romans who quashed the Dionysian Mysteries (then having evolved into the Bacchic Mysteries). However, the Christians certainly did not revive the ritual, and vilified Dionysus (remember how he’s Satan now?), leaving society in the realm of order and control.

Today we have our club scene and our raves. Pulsing music, dancing, intoxicants, primal yells, and sexuality are budding once again in our culture. While not as ritualistic as it once was, our desire to lose ourselves to our natural state is showing itself every weekend.

Of course, our desire to flee modernity into the past isn’t just limited to binge drinking and painful Sunday mornings. More mysteries have been lost than those of Dionysus, and those are the mysteries that every traveler seeks.

When we are at home, we know everything. We know the rules; science has explained pretty much most things worth knowing by this point, and this leads us to feel malcontent. When we travel, we are trying to experience the wonder that those in the past lived through every day. There was no understanding of rain or thunder, and gods were invented in order to explain them. Despite these explanations giving some amount of understanding, they were not cold, hard facts that once known could be filed away. The explanations gave just as much wonder as ignorance. Gods were fickle beings who were unpredictable and were prone to psychosis. The world was filled with uncertainty, mystery, and awe. In our lives today, we no longer possess these qualities.

Whenever we travel, however, we steal a fraction of what it might have been like to live in a world where wonder and awe were still in existence. Swimming with dolphins, marveling at the architecture of the Great Wall, desperately trying to survive the traffic of India, trying to communicate with the ticket guy in the subways of Paris… They are all incomprehensible to us, and that is why we seek them out. To fill our souls with wonder, to not understand how the world works. We immerse ourselves in environments, cultures, and situations that are foreign to us in order to experience something that we as a society have lost: enchantment.

Most religions of the world envision a paradise of primitivism. Gardens, usually. Christians have their Eden, the Islamic heaven is set in a garden, and Pure Land Buddhists believe that we can be reborn in a garden with Amitabha (or Amida, depending on how Japanese you are) Buddha, where achieving Nirvana will become much simpler. Eden is the prime example of humanity’s obsession with abandoning the structure of modernity and returning to a more natural state, as it was gaining the possession of the intellect that was the catalyst for our banishment from it.

Even in contemporary philosophy, we are stepping back from the long-held paradigm of objective, rational thought being the ideal, and we are entering into an era where experiential action is seen as paramount. To live authentically is to do things, not think about them. It is to abandon yourself to the moment, to embrace passionately every action that you take. Cling to your emotions over your calculating reason.

I understand the irony of Bros, ravers, and those super irritating people who are obsessed with “travel” being the paragons of my thesis. Our quest for primitivism is merely at its beginning, and our current methods of achieving wonderment are a second-rate reflection of the rituals of the past. However, we are starting to realize that we’ve lost something, and our mad grasps at regaining it are still in their infantile stages. Do we really need a connection to our natural state, or to lose ourselves in the moment, or to achieve a sense of awe at the world around us, now that science and modernity have explained away all the smoke from our eyes? I believe we do, and that is why we search for it.

Tags , ,
Categories Philosophy, Religion
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »