Dating : Two, politically. Our definitions of personhood

h2>Dating : Two, politically. Our definitions of personhood

The way out of our existential pain is to begin extending our human family outwards. Let me explain what I mean, because this is a strange and tricky concept. It took me a few months to understand that Snowy was, well, a little person. Not a human person, but a person all the same. A creature all his own, with desires and needs and interests and concerns.

And that is what explains the human being’s terrible capacity for violence. Which is currently in the process of destroying everything we know and hold dear. Climate change? Those megastores and megafires and megafloods now sweeping the globe? A direct result of our violence against nature. The imminent collapse of our civilization’s food, water, energy, air systems, pandemics, droughts, plagues, famines? A direct result of our violence against every other kind of life, which is now causing history’s sixth great mass extinction. The downfall of global democracy at the hands of authoritarians, from America to Brazil to India? The direct result of hate — intended violence — against each other. The way we numb ourselves to all the above with Instagram and Facebook? The direct result of hate — intended violence — against ourselves: maybe we don’t deserve to have a future.

We have destroyed most mammalian wildlife on the planet. We are in the process of destroying most of the other kinds of life there are, from reptiles to insects to forests. We’ve melted the ice, polluted the oceans, and bleached the reefs.

The world is a person. Every life on planet earth is a person. Every being on this globe is a person, too. We are all a family, which is a community of persons sustaining and supporting and nourishing one another.

Meanwhile, we project that outwards, in another classic defense mechanism. We regard animals as, well, “animals,” meaning they’re the violent and ignorant and brutish and selfish ones. LOL. Hardly. They’re not the ones causing mass extinctions and the death of life on the planet. We are.

Existential pain is the prime mover of the human capacity for violence, which is the most destructive force that our planet has ever seen. Sure, a meteor took out the dinosaurs once. Guess what? Today, we’re the meteor and the dinosaurs.

Keeping a calendar is not only useful for work-related tasks. We can hold time for our important relationships and for investing in ourselves. The practice fixes all three faults of running your day with a to-do list.

How did we human beings try to defend ourselves against the overwhelming pain of existing at all? First we invented religion. A magic perfect being in the sky in the sky made us. And we’ll live with him forevermore once we die. If you’re religious, I don’t mean to be mean. But I do mean to point out that religion is in some sense a defense against existential pain.

What would you imagine a being in such terrible pain as us naked walking apes would do? Think about it. A creature just in perpetual torment about existing at all. You’d expect that such a creature would go insane, more or less. Blind with rage. That they’d lash out in violence. Maybe even invent weird mythologies about how they were the chosen ones, out of all life to justify it. Rampage across their planet, remorselessly — because all that pain, which never really went anywhere, can only end erupt an orgy of spectacular destruction. Which, at least, gives some catharsis to it all.

So far as I can see, we’re — morally, ethically, spiritually, existentially — the lowest form of life on this planet, apart from maybe a virus. You won’t like to hear that, but I don’t mean it as an insult. I mean it analytically. The animals I know can do something remarkable we human beings can’t seem to. Coexist with each other. Lions are carnivores and predators — but they’re not trying to stock up trillions in bank accounts like Jeff Bezos. Snowy will happily coexist with…everyone. Especially if you give him huggies.

One, morally. Our moral community of persons must now be extended to include all life, which means something like: “we have to begin to regard everything else on this planet as a being capable of pain and suffering and joy and belonging, too.” A family is a moral community — and our human family is incomplete because we’re so busy trying to abuse and exploit the world, we’ve forgotten how to simply be part of it.

If you ask me, there’s one way out of the terrible problem of our existential pain, which is what’s really at the root of all today’s massive and yawning existential threats. The old ways — religion, nationalism, consumerism — don’t work anymore, and the truth is they never really did. They just lead us to worse places then where we began from.
Through these minds, we’ve come to understand that the human condition is something like this. We’re existentially alone, which means we’re lonely, in the deepest way there can be. We’re absolutely ignorant — none of the great answers we seek may even exist at all. And we’re existentially powerless — we know we’re going to die, and bang! That’s it.
Imagine a being in such pain — each and every day of their lives. In such fear, terror, abjection. It’s the most terrible kind of pain there can be, because it never ends, it appears to have no cause, no reason, no purpose. It just goes on and on. It’s unbearable. It was Freud, of course, who pointed out that when psychic pain is unbearable, human beings defend themselves against it.
Then, once God died, as Nietzsche said — meaning once we no longer could so easily believe in that idea — we invented consumerism. Buy stuff! To have status! And feel more powerful than the next walking ape. And escape from the terrible, terrible pain of just existing, for one more moment. Marx, of course, famously described religion as an opiate — and capitalism as a religion. He was right in one crucial sense. They are both there to dull the pain of existence.
Let me summarize all that. We walking apes are in terrible, terrible pain. It’s the deepest kind of pain — existential pain. We have no answers to any of our great questions, and there don’t appear to be any answers. The terror of all that, that void, drives us mad with rage and frustration and meaninglessness. We invent excuses — we’re the chosen ones of the person in the sky. This shiny toy or that ideology of supremacy will let me forget all about the fact I’m going to die and nobody knows why! — but they don’t work.
First, being a schedule builder instead of a to-do list maker affirms a better self-image. People are awful at predicting how long a task will take them to complete — hence our habitual failure to finish the tasks on our to-do lists. From now on, measure yourself not by what you finished, but whether you did what you said you would do, for as long as you said you would, without distraction.
Think carefully about us naked walking apes. American pundits will tell you human beings are the noblest creatures who ever were (and so will American preachers.) But are we?

Dating : Two, politically. Our definitions of personhood

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How do you let go of someone you love?

What are red flags in a relationship?

How do you know if he sees a future with you?

How do you tell if your ex secretly wants you back?

Will he forget me during no contact?

Why do guys pull away after intimacy?

What do you think?

Laisser un commentaire Annuler la réponse

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