Nietzsche once said:
"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”I think Nietzsche was incorrect. What doesn't kill you has a possibility of severely damaging you and making you wish it had finished you off.
My conclusion from all this is that life continuation is one hell of a risk. Not only do we have statistics for horrible tragedies, but what is arguably worse is that we don't have statistics for many other things. Every time you walk out of your door, you are exposing yourself to danger. Cognitive inadequacy limits our appreciation of this fact. Why is it that danger has to be practically right in front of us in order for us to register it? Because long-term risk management is not conducive to reproduction.
How ironic it is that the greatest pleasures in life come at such a steep risk.
If we were truly rational creatures, we would realize that our unconscious will-to-live is analogous to being dragged across a cheese grater. It is
manipulative in that it exposes us to dangers and harms that we otherwise would not choose to expose ourselves to. Epicureans are kidding themselves; we don't continue life for its pleasures, we continue life because we have no other realistic alternative. We are not in control.
Tolstoy hit the nail on the head when he articulated four categories of human existence:
1) Those who are blind to the human predicament (the ignorant fools)
2) Those who understand the human predicament but see pleasure as a reason to continue (the Epicureans)
3) Those who understand that human predicament but also understand that pleasure cannot be a true reason to live but continue to live anyway (the weak)
4) Those who understand everything the weak do, but have the guts to kill themselves (the strong)
Why is it that people will voluntarily insure themselves against catastrophes that may not ever happen, but don't insure themselves against the catastrophes that cannot be covered by money? The cognitive bias of
"that will never happen to me" effectively keeps people from questioning their own behavior.
If it can't be fixed or prevented, just don't think about it..... It is short-sighted and biased reasoning, meant not to service our welfare but to make sure we don't question our own fate.
This is tough to swallow. It's easy to get wrapped up in the moment and forget about the contingent nature of well-being. All of these possibilities are legitimate threats - but why worry about them? There's nothing you can do - except there actually
is, it's just that practically nobody wants to consider it. Suicide as a preventative measure is a perfectly rational and reasonable response to the threats exposure to the world brings. In fact it seems like it's the only option with a 100% guarantee of effectiveness.
But nobody, including myself, can actually consider suicide as a rational decision if we're not currently suffering tremendously. In existentialist terms, humans are capable of
transcendence - we are able to look beyond the immanent and see things how they could be. But we are nevertheless still immanent, and so the dynamic between transcendence and immanence emerges, with transcendence pushing forward and immanence pulling back. In the case of the rationality of suicide, we can transcend beyond our immediate experience and see how many risks and threats there are in the future, but are pulled back to immanence by the instinctual, irrational urge to persist.
There's more. I will not deny that pleasure is intrinsically good for people. But neither will I deny that pain is intrinsically bad for people. So when the cost of pleasure gets too high, or when the stakes accompanying existence are unreasonable, pleasure becomes a
good-turned-bad. Just as we may feel pain while climbing a mountain (a
bad-turned-good), the pleasure we feel as we systematically expose ourselves to a greater amount of harm cannot actually be truly good for us. That is when pleasure becomes manipulative and addictive. The fact that it is difficult to see the sorts of things we typically enjoy doing as goods-turned-bad is a consequence of them being addictions. Recall the analogy of the cheese grater. Pleasure are goods-turned-bad because the strength of the desire for pleasure is not matched by the actual content. On the other hand, we have a disturbingly small fear of pains are are unimaginably bad.
The environment we live in that seduces us into continued existence can only be see as a
web of toxicity. We live in a society that essentially indoctrinates us into continued existence.
We do not act in our best interests by continuing existing.
Some people might find my words dangerous. Am I actually recommending people kill themselves? Perhaps. What I am not advocating is the blind and instinctual journey through a strange world filled with risks, threats, and uncompensated pain.
What should we do, then? If we live in a world of threats of significant harm that cannot be compensated by any pleasure (terminal pain), is it possible to have a reason to live?
I would argue that there can be only one
genuine reason to live: ethics. Ethics is not about self-interest. It's not about maximizing your own welfare. It's about treating others well, caring for their well-being. The life of a person dedicated to an ethical cause is one of altruism and selflessness. Some people might accuse those people of tooting their own horn, but given what I have already articulated, there is no rational reason to live that doesn't ignore certain aspects of life. Those who follow the ethical path of life are those who are not living for themselves (as this is irrational given what we know of the human predicament), but are living for the sake of others. The concept of a Buddhist bodhisattva comes to mind. The bodhisattva has achieved nirvana but sticks around anyway to help everyone else achieve nirvana. Similarly, the enlightened ethicist knows that continued existence is a net harm (or at least an irrational risk), but sticks around anyway to maximize their utility to others. Suicide may be the rational option, but ethics isn't about what's best for you personally. It's about something greater than yourself.
And perhaps the "heroism" involved in selfless ethical life can be enough to keep the self-esteem of those committed to it high enough so they can continue to actually be productive.
What the enlightened ethicist also realizes are their own needs. So long as they are alive, they must tend to their own needs. Thus, nothing really changes all that much in terms of self-interested behavior, except that the self-interested behavior is not the purpose of life but rather a necessary requirement in order to maintain a maximally ethical life.
I will not pretend that I came up with all this by myself. I am heavily indebted to Buddhist ethics, the Argentine philosopher Julio Cabrera and his excellent book on "negative hyper-ethics", as well as Leo Tolstoy's
A Confession,
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, and Jean-Paul Sartre's
Nausea. I highly recommend checking these resources out. However, the synthesis of these works are of my own efforts.
From Jonathan Perratin's blog:
http://demonsanddiscourses.blogspot.com/2016/12/on-rationality-of-preventative.html
