Authors: Sean Douglas
They’re diagnosed with anxiety, and depression, and manic-depression, and bipolar disorder resulting from post-traumatic stress because their parents used to hit them or because they were raped.
And maybe that’s true for some people.
But a little bit of stress is natural.
There are whole parts of our genetic code that have been honed by thousands of years of evolution to deal with stress and anxiety and trauma.
For thousands of years of human evolution
, life has been merciless and unforgiving.
The wolf has
always been at the door.
A change in the weather and the crops fail and everyone starves.
Eat and you become hungry again.
Sleep and you become tired again.
Enough is never enough.
Contentment is temporary and equilibrium is illusory.
Sleep, health and wealth must be disturbed to be appreciated.
Maybe drugs and alcohol and caffeine and nicotine are just convenient shortcuts.
Maybe some people just like to get high.
Have you ever done drugs?
I’ve done my fair share.
Have you ever drank enough that the sound of everything is dull?
Until you’re numb.
Until there’s a warm, soft, forcefield between you and everything around you?
Like you’re the center of everything.
Maybe it’s not the addict’s fault.
Society exerts a continual pressure upon people to live up to its expectations, but it’s not that people have changed. The rules have changes. Society’s expectations have changed. With the exponential advances in our artificial technologies, obtaining employment requires a steadily increasingly complicated set of skills.
Without a high-school diploma, you’re destined to live a life scratching out a living on minimum wage. Or hustling to get what you need to survive.
Living under the radar.
Living in fear.
We’ve outsmarted ourselves.
People are worried that we’re going to accidentally ruin the planet.
They’re worried about recycling and global warming.
I think that’s stupid.
Recycling is a myth.
98% of America’s waste stream is commercial and industrial waste.
And there are, like, around 300,000,000 people living in America.
So even if you live a completely waste free lifestyle, it’s only going to decrease th
e waste stream by one-three-millionth of two-percent.
Think about that next time you’re washing out a tuna fish can.
Or carrying around a bottle until you can find a recycling kiosk.
It’s all just self-indulgent bullshit.
The only reason to recycle is if it makes you feel better.
The only time that recycling is going to make a difference is when it’s too late.
When we’ve finally used up all of the available resources.
T
he landfills will become goldmines.
People
will be fighting for the right to dig up everything anyone has ever thrown away to facilitate humanity’s last ditch attempt at continuing its existence as one of mother nature’s failed experiments.
Global warming?
How self-centered of humanity to believe that we’re a danger to the planet.
Planetary phenomena
are larger than humanity.
Maybe our behavior just happened to coincide with larger astronomical events. Maybe the sun is getting hotter.
But maybe this time we’ve managed to screw things up so badly that we threw things permanently out of equilibrium.
Maybe the surface of the planet will become so warm that all of th
e water will break down into its constituent gasses and in a billion years, an alien life form will wonder if there was ever water on planet earth.
The way we think about Mars.
Television transmissions theoretically radiate in every direction forever.
What must alien races think about our culture reflected in our media?
What will people a million years from now think about our lives today?
That’s the problem with people.
We can’t appreciate the beauty of anything that doesn’t revolve around us.
Just look at the language.
Sunrise.
Sunset.
The sun doesn’t move, at least not in relationship to the earth.
Our planet is just a speck on the universal map.
A year is one of the planet’s orbits divided by three-hundred and sixty-five and a quarter revolutions of the planet on its axis.
If the earth stopped spinning, but kept revolving around the sun, would it be the same time all year?
If the earth kept spinning, but stopped revolving around the sun, would
it stay the same day?
These are the kind of things that keep me up at night.
My only consolation is that nothing matters on a long enough timeline.
In five billion years, the suns going to go supernova and everything you’ve ever known will be nothing more than space dust.
Maybe global warming is just Mother Nature’s menstrual cycle.
The extinction of humanity will be just like mother earth discharging ropy ribbons of menstrual blood into space.
Another failed experiment.
Anthropomorphistic analogies aside, Mother Nature is not humane.
Mother Nature does not care if you live or die.
Maybe we’re the melanoma.
The cancer that keeps growing and growing until the systems start shutting down one by one.
But maybe we’re not the first.
Maybe the dinosaurs were mother earth’s first brush with cancer, but her immune system was able to take care of it. Maybe the dinosaurs were a problem, so mother earth flushed them out.
Some people think it was a giant fucking space rock that hit the earth and reversed the earth’s polarity and then it fell into orbit around the planet and we call it the moon.
But no one knows for sure. We weren’t around.
We can’t even predict next week’s weather and we’re presumptuous enough to think that we can figure out what happened millions of years before anything that we would comfortably call a human being walked the earth?
Fuck that noise. It’s all guesswork with science kits.
But I’ll take the scientific option over the creationism concept.
Remember that time in history when humanity thought that the world was created expressly for them?
Let me get this straight.
There’s this giant conscious being that exists in some trans-dimensional place.
For some reason beyond our grasp, he decided to make our universe.
A universe that is so large that it is truly beyond our ability to wrap our minds around it in any real sense.
And while he was designing the universe, he decided to make our solar system and our planet and our species the whole reason for the entire project.
The universe is a giant playpen for these smart monkeys that live on a planet in a solar system that isn‘t even in the center of the universe as far as we can tell.
Some people even think that dinosaurs were created in simultaneity with man.
Mostly creationists. Who are just stupid.
Let me get that one straight.
Every variety of animal now in existence on earth lived within walking distance of Noah’s Ark?
And everyone on the planet was bred from the same small group of people?
So we’re all the product of incest?
That explains a lot for me.
Organized religion never really had any great appeal to me.
I’ve read The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Sri Isopanishad, and the Tao Te Ching.
They were all
great works of fiction. Very interesting, but equally useless.
Church was a boring place that
my parents made me go every Sunday where nothing that the guy behind the bureau said ever made any sense.
There were all these stupid fucking parables about loaves and fishes and blood and wine and
Good Samaritans, and doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you.
I remember being forced to attend Sunday School
where there was a sheepish shrewish young woman that spent most of the time trying to deal with our restlessness.
I was forced to memorize the Our Father and get my first communion, but at least I was smart enough to negotiate the terms. My mother said that if I got my first communion I didn’t have to go to church anymore. I guess she figured if I got my first communion then my soul would be saved.
Insert irony here.
I didn’t think much about religion in high school except to know that I didn’t have much use for it.
I tried out Wicca.
It was just retarded.
It was kind of like Christianity but the books were a lot cooler and you got to play with cooler toys.
One had miracles and the other had magic, but at least Wicca was sexy.
I learned how to read Tarot cards, but I never bothered to memorize what the cards meant.
All I really learned was that tarot cards look cool and people will believe almost anything you tell them.
I took a couple philosophy courses
in college. I was really good at logic.
It was great to learn how to express the vague but pervasive disagreement I had with
Christianity.
I had a revelation.
The qualities inherent in the Judeo-Christian God are Omniscience, Omnipotence and Perfection.
In layman’s terms, he is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfect. He can not ever be wrong.
This is important. I hope you’re paying attention.
God knows EVERYTHING.
He knows everything that has ever happened and everything that is ever going to happen. Since God already knows everything you’re ever going to do, then anything that you’re ever going to do has already been decided for you. This is called predetermination.
If God is all powerful, then it follows that humanity is powerless. If humanity is powerless, then any delusions that we have of the ability to effect our destiny through action are false.
And perfection. Well, I don’t really have to explain perfection for you.
Fine and well.
But if everything that I have ever done or am ever going to do has already been determined, then everything is God’s fault.
Kids with cancer? God’s fault.
Global warming? Thank God!
Child molesters? Rapists? Murderers? Racism? Slavery? War? Abortions?
Blame God.
John Wayne Gacy? Jeffrey Dahmer? Ted Bundy? Andr
ei Chikatilov? All God’s children.
It’s such a relief.
If you believe in God, then you should be absolved of any kind of personal responsibility for your actions. So, in essence, being a Christian means never having to say you’re sorry.
That would be great if I only could believe in God.
Invisible man lives in the sky?
And if you get on your knees and clasp your hands and wish real hard he makes thing go your way?
I just can’t get behind that.
Instead I
choose free will.
These days when people ask me what religion I am I tell them I’m an existentialist.
Or a Satanist.
A more complicated but more honest answer is that I practice chaos magic.
I try to create a situation as close as possible to my desired results and I roll the cosmic dice and take my chances.
I really think that’s the best anyone can ever hope for.
At least this way I don’t have to
meet up with a bunch of other people every Sunday so we can compare clothes.
I grew up in a housing project.
And no, I’m not going to tell you which one.