The Lost Realist

PS: This piece is written in a diatribe tone and applies as much to me as the reader. When I say we humans are morons, that includes me ;). And of course, the standard disclaimer is that all this is IMHO. The reader is welcome to differ on some/all points :).

Some say life’s meaning is to be found by studying matter. Some say it is to be found in the mind. Some say it lies nowhere. Some say values are nothing, others say truth is not absolute. And still others contend that reality is a dream and there’s nothing to know. The list of views goes on and on, ad nauseum. But all philosophers who propose and discuss all these concepts endlessly agree in one respect: they will sit and think about all this for an hour and then “get on with life”. I find this term very interesting. When we come face to face with direct contradictions in our behaviour, or double standards in the way we think of ourselves and others, we decide to consciously shut that thing off from our mind, chuck it out of the window, perhaps even give ourselves an obviously specious argument to support our behavior and “get on with life”: keep doing just what we did before, keep thinking the way we thought before and live life the way we did before, tacitly agreeing that perhaps we will never come to an understanding and its just ok to spend life this way and die.

This kind of life has only one value: Biological Productivity. We at least manage to do what nature intends all animals to do: Breathe, Drink, Eat, Sleep and Reproduce. I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense. It might just be ok for us to be (self-glorified) animals. In fact, half or maybe all of our problems arise from our collective ego which places us far above the rest of creation. In this way, we are really not far behind the ancient greeks, who placed earth at the center of the cosmos. We still think of ourselves as the center of the universe, the only transition has been a change in interpretation from the literal to the metaphorical. In our view, we are simply the best thing that nature came up with. The fact that we haven’t yet observed one trillionth of the cosmos doesn’t seem to matter a lot in this view of ours, of course. Lets look at what science tells us: We depend on a giant nuclear explosion for survival, medium in size by nature’s standards, which will extinguish after sometime, taking us along with it if we don’t find some other planet to live on. And more probably, we will destroy our own planet in the meantime. So, where is our greatness?

By the way, it is really much much more probable that we will kill ourselves before the sun gets exhausted. When it comes to world peace, we humans act like a bunch of rowdy kids, the only difference being that rowdy kids usually don’t have access to nuclear weapons and don’t kill each other on a regular basis and on top of that, justify such behaviour with cunning abstractions like patriotism or religious sentiment. Such abstractions only fool people who have never seen, or never cared to imagine arms fly around on a bomb’s detonation. Why? Because nature has biologically wired us to response with deep reluctance for killing members of our own species. A normal human simply can’t watch another one being mauled to death. And why did nature do that? To protect our species. But then why did nature fail? It did the mistake of giving us intelligence. Now we can be physically remote from a human victim so that natural inhibitions don’t work anymore, then fire off a bomb, kill him and come home satisfied with an abstraction of patriotism which safely masks off any remaining traces of mental discomfort.

Again, I don’t mean it in a derogatory sense when I say that we are still pretty immature mentally, this is simply the way we are, we just don’t want to accept it as-is. After all, we are the marvels of creation, how can we be savages, right? The truth is this: We are the only animals who can intelligently manage their resources so that the resource versus humans ratio is optimal and resource conflict, which is the reason for all wars, is completely avoided. This we won’t do. Instead we will pick a piece of land (even if its a desert and completely useless for anything), draw lines around it, call it holy, post a flag in it and pledge our irrational allegiance to it. You will even find people who call themselves “anti-cultist” in every way and are proud patriots. In today’s world everyone sees blind attachment to a religious doctrine as dangerous due to acts of terrorism, but why do we think blind attachment to a piece of land is not dangerous? A religious doctrine and patriotism, both are based on an irrational belief on an abstraction which gives rise to a collective ego. All human violence except the one involving basic human needs is based on conflict between collective egos, which are inevitably based on some sort of mental abstraction. Abstractions such as “God will save us and not the heathens”, “Our nation is the true land of the gods”, etcetera. We spend a large portion of our productive lives working hard to feed our armies. And why do we humans do all this? That part is simple, we build armies so that one day, we can all die in peace. Am I the only who can’t see any logic in all this?

I don’t want to harp on this issue any longer but here’s a nice way to put things in perspective: An alien is watching earth from the distance as to what intelligent life is doing there and how advanced we are. One day, kaapow! and earth evaporates. The alien can’t stop laughing and thinks to himself “Those bunch of idiots blew themselves up!”. It takes intelligence to build a bomb and wisdom not to build it in the first place. Ants figure out that killing each other is not the best way to maintain a colony, but we haven’t. We are more intelligent but the ants are wiser. The worse part is that we will take all of nature’s work down the drain along with ourselves.

But anyway I digress. Back to us thinking of ourselves as something central to the universe. This finds its best expression in the quest for the meaning of life. We think we are much better than animals, so our purpose must obviously be something “higher”. The answer is really simple, its just that we are too afraid to accept it at face value: There is no discernible higher purpose to life and we are here clueless as to what to do with all the free time. If we were just like other animals, happy to eat, sleep and reproduce, there would be no problem. But thats our problem, created by the specific way our brain has turned out to be, we are the only animals who can feel the pain of purposelessness and boredom and so its upto us to find the answer. And our intellect does a really good job of screwing things up further. We have powers of abstraction. So at any given point in time, we can imagine some alternate reality and associate our happiness with that. This association is mostly arbitrary, but the pain of that is real. Discontentment and the resulting ambition are the first symptoms of this. Give someone 1000 dollars for a day, which is sufficient to buy him all the basic amenities of life and instead of enjoying his time with it, he will start imagining “What if I had 10,000 dollars,” compare his present situation to the imagined universe and feel unhappy. I am not making a philosophical argument here, this kind of thinking points to a psychological disorder in a very very real sense, because a person without this disorder will be happier at any given point in time compared to a discontented person.

It is important to note that I am not saying that our intellect is something bad, its a very powerful tool, but its just that we routinely use it the wrong way. We are like a child with a powerful shotgun, we routinely stare down its barrel and press the trigger: Owning the shotgun doesn’t mean that we necessarily have the sense of how to use it; Owning a superior intellect doesn’t mean we know how to use it and where to apply it. Striving and working hard for something is acceptable, but constantly being in pain because of it is not. People talk about having dreams and chasing them. I don’t endorse the usual way this statement is construed. What it is telling people is that its ok to build imaginary universes in their head and try hard to turn them into reality, creating brand new avenues for pleasure and pain. I already have enough avenues for pleasure and pain, thank you. When all ancient mature eastern civilizations taught contentment and hard work, they were being really wise. They were pointing to a way of life in which material progress and human happiness could be seamlessly integrated, based on their understanding of human psychology, which anyone with a working brain can study. We were very quick to throw their opinions out of the window, of course. Look humanity, we may not be happy, but we are rich and know more about calculus than gotama buddha could have ever imagined! We know how to send people to the moon, but still don’t know how to make ourselves happy after our basic needs are fulfilled. All our intellectual achievements count to naught.

The only contemporary example I can think of which fits this idea of a happy life is Gandhi. Gandhi was a real (as opposed to armchair) philosopher. Firstly, he had the courage and will-power to try out his ideas in his own life. Philosophy can’t be a profession, its a way of life. If someone is a professional philosopher and he doesn’t experiment with his own life, he is basically professionally wasting tax-payer’s money. Back to Gandhi. His second quality is that he worked really hard in his life, but was never stressed. He was completely content with his life. Simple food, simple living. Thirdly, he was an intelligent man and wasn’t a patriotic idiot. He swore no allegiance to the piece of land that is India. Instead he wanted the welfare of Indian People. Thats a subtle but extremely important distinction. Thats why, I think, he accepted the proposal to divide India into India and Pakistan. He thought it would do the people good (whether this thought of his was right or wrong is another matter, but the motive was most probably this), it didn’t matter if they gave the same piece of land two names. He didn’t care about the nation, he cared about its people. Thats a lesson we all failed to learn. Now India and Pakistan have drawn a border between themselves and keep quarelling over it, turning away money from the people to their armies. Gandhi must be turning in his grave, or rather if he has gone to the gods, laughing at us along with them for our foolishness. We have failed to learn his example at all levels, from personal to political.

Anyway, back to my original question about the meaning of life. Why do you think there should be one? Who are you to demand the heavens for a meaning for life. Look out of the window, there are a zillion stars in the universe. Get a sense of perspective first. You are a tiny dot on a tiny dot on a tiny dot, ad infinitum. What, in your opinion, makes you so central to the universe as a whole? If you believe in god (more on god in another essay), then he has much bigger things to worry about. If you don’t, then why do you think you, who are such a small spec in the universe, deserves to be treated specially? Whole stars burn down in supernovas, so what if you die tomorrow, whats the big deal? Why do you think your death is something crucial, for which the universe must provide you with an answer. Be thankful for the time you’re alive, and try to be happy with what you have in the meantime. We act like a bunch of babies, fighting over candies, crying at the heavens when we don’t get our candy and never realizing there is a big world out there. It is a precise analogy to the human condition. We have am extremely bad case of tunnel vision. We create finer and finer distinctions in the conditions surrounding us and map happiness and unhappiness to them. Of course we are so confused because of all this. If we could just be content to have a roof on the head, food, sleep, a life-partner and children, everything would be fine. But no, our needs know no bounds.

Our instincts are not sacrosanct, we need to ask for their justification constantly, thats what the intellect is for. The way I see life is this: Work hard and earn enough to satisfy your basic needs. If you don’t get something, get on with it. There’s no place in life for regrets. All desires and discontentment are the intellect’s creation, beyond the basic animal needs. Our basic animal needs are meant for the survival of the human species, period. Only these animal needs are real, all else is pure fabrication. Being rich, social recognition, power, fame, finding the meaning of life, all this is completely imaginary. I will emphasize again that I am not making any abstract arguments here. There is simply no place in the scheme of things for individuals and their imaginary needs. These things only make us more unhappy compared to the way we were to start with.

The sooner we stop acting like babies, get a sense of perspective, accept our tiny place in the universe as humans, and our tiny place in the scheme of things in general and turn our intellect towards the inside to find what really makes us happy and learn to be content, the better it is for our own long term good, or rather, our survival.

Best of luck to us.