The Enlightenment, Progress, and the Death Instinct

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Warm_Light_9359@reddit

Needed these words today, thank you my friend.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

You're welcome, glad my thoughts could help.

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name_us3r@reddit

We're headlong into an age of unreason and superstition for sure.. Thanks for sharing your eloquence.

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stomachlesswonder@reddit

This post got me through today. Bless you, OP.

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SaxManSteve@reddit

Please keep posting on here, i'm looking forward to your next aricle! Amazing stuff.

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Aye. I was already in the acceptance phase of grief, which started right in 2021, the last sliver of hope burning in july when an unpopular status quo candidate was chosen without contest or even a token challenge.

This was inevitable. Slow plutocratic rot will evolve into increasing stages of oligarchic repression punctuated by an economic collapse and climate disasters which will eventually max out the country credit card.

Then the rich and connected will cannibalize their own, and seize assets. Working people will walk from their jobs when they cannot provide even our needs.

At which point they will bind people to their jobs. First those said to owe money, then all. The specter of feudalism is on the horizen.

But if we organize outside of politics in multiple ways we can create the change and security that our captured politicians were never going to provide. Ape strong together.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

Yes, it is a fascinating disease that the rich think they might 'do better' in their bunker society. It will absolutely suck, but specifically I don't think any of those billionaires could make do in those conditions.

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ObssesesWithSquares@reddit

I feel like the people who don't want to let the world go to hell, should form groups and communities devoted to bettering themselves, rather than trying to save the doomed race as a whole.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

Already working on it.

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IsFreeSpeechReal@reddit

A gem in the rough...

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

<3 Thank you <3

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psychotronic_mess@reddit

We are all slaves. Even the loathesome, parasitical bourgeoisie. I don’t know if oblivion changes that or not. I plan on watching the fire die, and then finding out. So it goes.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

So it goes, indeed. I must wonder what someone like Kurt Vonnegut or Hunter S. Thompson would have said right now.

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Franklyidontgivashit@reddit

I hope that the majority of intelligent life in the universe is endowed with a spiritual love of life above all else.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

Me too! I increasingly think humans aren't actually eusocial. Eusocial within their monkeysphere, but the enlightenment didn't actually work on most people.

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leo_aureus@reddit

Thank you very much for this.

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Cathartes_Aura_@reddit

thoroughly enjoyed this... well, enjoyed in a cathartic way.

some other cathartic philosophical thoughts that help me personally that aren't as darkly flavored:

the universe is seemingly deterministic. fate is "baked in." we are on this path to ruin as "written" already at the dawn of time in our dna, in our gut bacteria, and our amygdala. we were born into the world destined to destroy it in the pursuit of onion rings and lubed orifices. we are destruction, fed by desires, ruled in a deterministic universe. run simulation four trillion, seven thousand and ninety three; simulation has once again ended with humanity eating itself. Willy Bumble wakes up this morning stressed about money, and his gut bacteria is sending warning chemicals to his mind requesting fats and carbohydrates to deal with the previous night's margaritas; he orders onion rings at Applebees a trillion times on November 7th 2024...

but:

there is a "hack" to causality. mind. mind is unbound by casual universe. imagine yourself burning upon the surface of the sun Proxima Centuri, and you have broken the speed of light in this travel in mind. craft a universe where outcomes are determined by a 20 sided dice and statistics, and you have violated thermodynamics. imagine a universe now where the ratios governing quantum flavordynamics are skewed and you have beheld a universe with one or no suns. our minds break the universe.

consider now then, that causality, "fate" or whatever, is an equation that must be solved. perhaps fate is something like, one plus one equals onion rings. consider then, that you are Willy Bumble, and Willy happens to be a sociopath. Willy has had a bad day, a very bad day. His addictions are not met, and his desires unfulfilled. Willy goes into a gas station looking for some chewing Tobacco at the end of this long wreck of a day. They are out of skol! Willy is fated to kill someone today, as written upon the surface of the information center of this holographic universe upon it's birth. one plus one equals murder... except Willy has a mind, a mind that can supersede causality. Upon hearing about the Skol shortage caused by the wreckage of tobacco crops last year; his mind plays a simulation of the murder. his mind solves the murder equation virtually internally.... and he decides... he decides it will better serve him to get a mountain dew than to disembowel the clerk. Willy has beaten fate.

currently we find ourselves in a culturally materialistic bent. god is science, karma is capatalism, and mind is a curios function of electrochemical impulses. it's no wonder that we, as a society, as a species, have failed at aspirational thinking, at rationality... "these meat blobs between our ears cannot actually go to Proxima Centuri," and yet the transcendent element of this mental exercise goes ignored. it is not "real," the mantra of the materialist, and ignoring the fundamentally bizarre phenomenon inherent to mind in relation to causality... leaving them for fuzzy answers in the realm of philosophy and religion. ignored, untouched, radioactive and dangerous.

continuing materialism will not save us. it ends in the worship of fate and dogmatic adherence to it's destinies. we will continue to eat ourselves and praise the universe for allowing us to do so. only mind has the capability to free us from these thermodynamic constraints, and mind is currently only found in philosophies and theologies.

we fix this problem with that then. fuck materialism. perhaps this cultural change starts as some religion or some such thing. not some crappy demiurge-worshipping bastardization of theocratic masturbation; or some flattened and comodified crystal worhsip; but something that brings humans into some idea of divine inherent and participatory. then we can collectively perhaps, "imagine" solution and strive for it.

there's my hope anyways. although i'm quite certain that some such societal change will only happen once things have been well and truly fucked.

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Ok_Arugula_8871@reddit

Holy shit..... did that just pour out of you as easily as it reads? I'm....idk what.. I was reasonably certain no intelligent life remained on this planet. Gifted in so many ways like I have never seen.....I feel .... thankful and blessed

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Icy_Frosting3874@reddit

reading this to david bowie’s 5 years is quite the combo. i don’t know what to feel, to be honest, but its probably gonna sink in one day. whatever it is, if we still have ap lit in 10 years, this should be included in the coursework.

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Ndgo2@reddit

Please lock yourself in a room and write a novel.

I beg you.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

Thank you. It is NaNoWriMo, I could give it a try!

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Used_Occasion_1508@reddit

I'd read it

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morning6am@reddit

Agreed 100%!

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LemonyFresh108@reddit

Thank you for this beautiful piece. It softens the knife edge of despair.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

You're very welcome. It was a cathartic writing sesh.

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bernpfenn@reddit

thanks for this text. it gave me a moment of peace

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SmilingAmericaAmazon@reddit

Thank you for writing this. We are old, kids ( 7 and younger) don't have keyboards anymore and don't know how to use a mouse - it is all touchscreen

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Myth_of_Progress@reddit

This was a fabulous and unique read - thank you for sharing. Some of my favourite excerpts are quoted below:

For as God died in the haze of industrialization, global conflict, and governmentality; we too see that Reason, still holding the knife wet with holy ichor, shall suffer an ignoble death.

Logarithms cannot continue in a bounded universe, and one can give a point to the Billionaires. For the economy will be a zero sum game. Light 'em while you got 'em boyz. Technology, oil, and capital does not merely produce the material conditions of history, but also provides the control over populations. We have seen the most advanced machine ever built be used for naught more than showing an engaging series of images and rotting out the brains of the population. Perhaps one could be charitable and point out that such an algorithm also sells cheap garbage!

Like a fat child with a ring of chocolate around their mouth, our society did not see the devil at the crossroads of empire and technology. Our souls were long ago bargained away, and unlike Faust we are not pulling a fast one on carbon dioxide concentrations.

The great experiment winds down, as does the carrying capacity of the Earth.

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gaia1234567@reddit

This was great. Thank you

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lightweight12@reddit

Johnathan Pie tells it like it is...again

https://youtu.be/x0eq7VNCcYY?si=CNtQs7rvFx4ZOdt3

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

Submission Statement:

Haven't done this in a while. Stoked I shat out 10,000 words in an evening, I'm not reading the news or looking at my phone until tomorrow morning. (Help me aaaaaaaaaa!) I'd like to thank various philosophers and my moms. Also how good is this passage from Malthus:

If the subsistence for man that the earth affords was to be increased every twenty-five years by a quantity equal to what the whole world at present produces, this would allow the power of production in the earth to be absolutely unlimited, and its ratio of increase much greater than we can conceive that any possible exertions of mankind could make it ... yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the greater power.

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HappyCamperDancer@reddit

I read a lot of Malthus in my teens. Never had kids as a result, and it was one of my best decisions. Now I am in the twilight of my life, I kinda don't care what happens to ME, but I am sad, sad, sad for all the generations behind me. All the beauty of the diversity of life, being eliminated in the 6th great extinction. Sad for the girls and women treated as 2nd class citizens. Sad for anyone that is POC, LGBTQ, disabled or poor.

Sad. It was brief but beautiful.

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ItyBityGreenieWeenie@reddit

I enjoyed this... don't know what to call it. Polemic? We needed that today. Thanks.

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freedcreativity@reddit (OP)

Aye, I'd call it that. Thanks <3

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throwaway13486@reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/1ggmszx/everything_that_can_be_invented_has_already_been/

Here's hoping (heh) you'll appreciate it more than the copers over there

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Geaniebeanie@reddit

Hey, man. I’d love to contribute something intellectual, but I’ve had three hours of sleep, far too much coffee and sugar, and anger burning in my brain to be able to string two sentences together, but I will say this, with the likelihood that you’ll probably be aware of my reference:

This fucking interferes with my True Will.