Philosophical pessimism

[Pajeetsingh]

As a philosophy, pessimism needs no defense. If anything needs a defense, it is life itself. And there is no shortage of defenders; it is enough to take a walk around any bookstore to see that there are entire sections dedicated to positivism and self-help. Thousands of books and millions of words that seek to convince us that happiness is possible, that success and well-being are in our hands. That we have power. That we can achieve what we want. That we can succeed and we can win at life, because life is good and worth living. Look closely at what they tell us: life can be won. It seems to me that, without realizing it, these optimists do nothing more than confirm what every pessimist already knows: that life requires effort and that it is a constant struggle and sacrifice; that it is a contest, a confrontation, something that must be won. On this point, Schopenhauer's sentence is overwhelming: if life was designed for our happiness, then it was poorly designed, because everything in life seems to shout loudly: death, pain, illness, sacrifice and endless struggle.

 

[Pajeetsingh]

In August 1973 a group of robbers entered the Swedish Credit Bank in Stockholm and took hostages for six days. What no one expected was that the hostages would end up identifying with the robbers/kidnappers. Suddenly they were more afraid of the police and felt that those who were holding them hostage were precisely the only ones who could now protect them. The victims identified with the perpetrators. That event was a small-scale recreation of what happens on a cosmic level. Life is a torment and a curse from the day we are born, but at some point we identify with it. Life is the cause of all our ills. But now we defend it.

 

[NirvanaFan1988]

 

[Pajeetsingh]

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

 

[FakeFakecel]

 

[Pajeetsingh]

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

 

[FakeFakecel]

 

[Diddy]

 

[Pajeetsingh]

What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out—not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness.

 

[Pajeetsingh]

I envy those who are dead and gone; they are better off than those who are still alive. But better off than either are those who have never been born, who have never seen the injustice that goes on in this world