Anywhere But Here Is Better

When you add it all up

Being inquisitive by nature, I have spent (wasted?) a lot of time trying to figure out why things are the way they are. I'm not sure I have got very far after all these years. The craziness of life in general - and the way people tick in particular - has only increased in scale the more I have tried to make sense of 'it'.

Obviously, it would be much easier not to think about such things. I sometimes long for an off button that would shut down the part of my brain that devotes itself to puzzling and wondering. This function is very similar to a Jack Russell terrier, famed for never letting go once it has sunk its teeth into some unfortunate's fleshy parts.

 

Sniffing out an answer

 

Love is supposed to be the answer to everything, or at least the antidote. It is all we need, chanted John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Buddhists say that loving one's self is the route to loving all things, at which point one reaches blissful Enlightenment. If only it was that simple.

Lust is commonly mistaken for love. While it is a useful precursor for reproduction, which is all that is required by evolution, lust doesn't automatically translate into love. Love means putting another person's survival ahead of one's own. I'm not sure how many 'lovers' subscribe to self-extinction when Hobson's Choice rears its head.

 

It takes two

 

Of course, we must do everything to remain positive minded, despite all that life throws at us. In the dark before the dawn, what sustains me is the gritty resolve not to be broken by the hurricane force winds of injustice that blow incessantly through the human forest.

Could the world be any different to what it is now? In theory, yes. In practice, I suggest the opposite. The same laws of 'survival of the fittest' that have led to more than seven billion of us human viruses living and breathing on this rock have governed that we must have power structures that deny the good life to all but a handful at the 'top'.

Knowledge should be the measure of fitness, or rather wisdom or to use the most correct term: sapience. I would be delighted to remain a lowly serf if people like Einstein and Gandhi were in charge of our destiny. Instead, we consistently have a breed of intellectual lightweights grabbing and holding onto the reigns of power every generation, their one quality being the ability to hoodwink the vast majority while feathering the nests of the tiny minority.

Summing all this up, I have to find a new approach to discovering the true meaning of life. Rather than look at the whole picture, which is overwhelmingly depressing and almost impossible to carry inside one single brain, perhaps I should look at specimen information and assess the totality based on a broad sampling. For example, instead of reading whole paragraphs of data, perhaps I could just collect the first letters of the first word and see what this all adds up to. Maybe the result will make better sense of everything. Yes, I think I'll try this, starting with this very blog article as an experiment.

Isaac's balls at work

Living in Disappointment, population 7,000,000,001

What is this place coming to? All the creativity and inventiveness and energy and enthusiasm and aspiring and dreaming and extreme patience under duress has this outcome? Really? This is evolution? This is intelligent life?

 

Interesting town meetings

 

I've been taking stock.

The super-rich are permitted and even incited to pay little tax, even though it would hardly dent their wealth one iota. The greed-motivated banksters steal from the general public and won't lend money that's not theirs in the first place to good businesses that could hire people from the dole queues. Entire industries despoil and pollute their own backyards to make a fast buck for their criminally myopic senior managers and equally complicit shareholders. Expanding numbers of no-haves worldwide are incarcerated in drug-infested jails as a reward for poor education and minimal life prospects. Health and welfare outside of the affluent are increasingly deemed unimportant, left to chance or heroic charitable efforts. ‘Democratic’ governments persistently ignore the will of the people, most notably in the US and UK, using whipped-into-a-frenzy police rather than good argument to exercise their governing. Autocratic regimes everywhere torment their own citizens, bestially preferring to torture rather than cull. Country after country beat the drums of war, in an Orwellian dance designed to keep their own populace living in fear and subdued into grateful inertia.

Am I nuts to question why the West is jumping up and down about Iranian nuclear intentions while enjoying bully-boy status because of their own jealously guarded nuclear arsenals? Anyone with half a human brain would surely suggest that all countries self-preserve by signing up to a binding ‘no use’ pact, rendering redundant the rush to obtain such idiotic weapons.

Why are the same politicians who spout forth about respect for human rights travelling the world like cheap whores touting lethal weapons to questionable regimes? Surely the idea is finally to move from loaded guns to round-table dialogue as a method of settling disputes in this so-called new century.

 

Yep

 

Why are religious institutions brainlessly choosing to fragment and weaken rather than unite and strengthen under common cause? Why the heck does it matter what faith people call themselves, or what gender do the ministering to their congregation, when at root all who term themselves believers believe in identical principles of godly behaviour on this miniscule blue pebble orbiting an insignificant star in a Milky Way back passage.

Come to that, why does anyone anywhere try to convince anyone else that they're wrong about anything? Who has access to the Whole Truth? No one does, not even those smug anti-God scientists who claim only to believe what is provable, and then go quiet when you probe them about how much of what they “know” today is merely accepted theory until “proven” otherwise by fellow members of the scientific fraternity with bigger research budgets and smarter grey matter.

If we were intelligent in the first place, natural selection by all accounts would have increased the level of intelligence - because intelligence is a survival aid. So I can only conclude that we are not an intelligent species, because the level of stupidity is growing, especially among our puffed-up masters. Look at the field of 2012 US presidential candidates, and look at the current crop of genii (sic) in the UK parliament. I rest my case, m'lud.

Observe any humble squirrel unkilled by road traffic and smog and deforestation. What does it do when winter is ahead? We are pathetic in comparison. The whole of capitalism - the epitome of freedom according to many lame brain economists - is utterly short termist. To the point where the amassing of shed-loads of personal wealth by the very few string-pullers has become the only raison d’être of economic activity. Whatever happened to building a better world for all our children?

Me, I have no fear about the future. I'm a tad jaded about the wisdom-free genetic line to which I apparently belong, but I'm not frightened of what's coming. And it's coming as sure as a runaway train down a mountain pass, accelerating as it nears the buffers. No, what I find scary to behold is the blindness of the ruling class, who if they think at all think that fitting castors to the deckchairs on the Titanic is a prudent way to behave.

Over and out.

15-04-12 R.I.P.