If The Universe Could Hear You...

Well, it's almost time for tryptophan with all the fixin's washed down with the alcohol of your choice, but that doesn't really change the fact that, like the last post I wrote, I have no earthly idea what the hell to write about. It kind of sucks. I started writing here again because I wanted to, but the dearth of motivation is preventing me from really making an effort.

Well, motivation is not really the word. I am motivated to write. I tried doing NaNoWriMo and got all of 400-odd words done. Yay, it says I win just for trying. There are about 6,000,000,000 things I read every day that I'd love to comment on or analyze, but I can never keep my thoughts straight.

QUAAAAAACK quackquackquack...

I've thought about crazy-ass things like how globalization has made it easy to travel and pass money around, and consequently has made it easier to spread pathogens throughout the globe as evidenced by Max Brook's excellent book World War Z, a zombie book that is about anything BUT zombies.  And then I read about things like the Stuxnet Virus that brings to reality crazy things that Angelina Jolie could stop with her youthful collagen duckface just 15 years ago, when she was only just beginning to make shitty movies.  After putting 2 and 2 together it seems that this computer pathogen could spread globally along similar vectors as zombies, or pandemic influenza, or whatever, given a motivated enough individual to start the process.

But then ... yawn.  Maybe I'll burn the brain cells doing something more inane like configuring my fantasy football lineup for the coming week to keep my 4-game winning streak alive.

But I digress.  Back to Thanksgiving.

Yes the white man came, across the sea, and brought them pain and misery...because, you know, they were already living in harmony and hadn't already been trying to slaughter each other for their land, food and women for the last however many centuries simply because the other injuns lived over the river and through the woods and not here.  Doesn't justify shit, but face it - homo sapiens = bastards whether you have rifles or rocks tied to sticks.

So the Europeans prayed to God and used him as a convenient conversion sham to conquer and when that had petered out they shrouded expansion under his will.  The natives prayed to the Great Spirit or a pile of sticks or whatever and it did them a whole shitload of good.  At least in Innsmouth they pray to Cthulhu and once you get past the fish transformation you get to live forever.

So I found it kind of amusing when yesterday, at the office just stuff yourself and believe you have it good Thanksgiving potluck, a fellow of mine suggested "Let's have the biggest atheist here say grace."  I snerked.  That would have been him, because I'm still an atheist in denial holding on to what vestiges of his agnosticism can still get him by.  But the reason I snerked was because he was standing behind my boss; a good guy, but a dyed in the wool Christian through and through.  Which is probably why he said it.

So when we had broke to eat, I suggested he try this at his table this Thursday:

"Oh Universe, thank you for big-banging and expanding in such a way that your physical properties developed in such a way that I can experience and enjoy the life I have right now.  But you can't hear or understand this, so why am I even saying anything at all..."

But alas, in the end, I will always be a sort of middle-of-the-road guy when it comes to beliefs.  So enjoy the weekend in whatever way gives you the most benefit.

Self Interest Wins the Day

So a close, long-time friend of mine poses a question on Facebook - to paraphrase:

Do you expect people to do the right thing and be disappointed when they don't, or expect people to be bastards and be pleasantly surprised when they do the right thing?

As you can imagine, answers were numerous and interesting. Replies ranged from positive to negative to non-judgemental to absolute moral relativism. Then there was my response, "Expect the right thing and ensure no good deed goes unpunished." I wrote it mostly because I was thinking very hard about this and I didn't want to write a book on this Facebook comment, so I was somewhat tongue in cheek.

I fall squarely in the first category. I expect the right thing to be done, and I'm perpetually disappointed when so many people don't do it. The more I think of it, the more this flies in the face of what I know of human behavior.

As Dr. Perry Cox says,

"Lady, people aren't chocolates. D'you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. But I don't find them half as annoying as I find naive bubble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine."

Well, maybe not. People are organisms. Organisms compete. To quote Michael Pollan, "All life is competition". Actually I'm leaving out "...for energy" because I don't want this to run off on a tangent about energy; it'll have enough tangents as it is. But to paraphrase him, plants compete for solar energy, herbivores compete for the plant energy, predators compete for the herbivores, blah blah blah. In other words, organisms are programmed to compete for what they need to survive.

In the case of us so-called "higher organisms" we compete with each other to satisfy our self-interests.

Man is fundamentally self-interested. I believe people do things largely out of self-interest. Even so-called "unselfish" acts have an element of self-interest. The unselfish actor feels that it is in his or her self-interest to do something for someone else, whether it directly affects or improves his/her well being / situation, or it provides a level of satisfaction knowing that you did something for someone.

When self-interests coincide and the individuals can (roughly) agree, they become a code of conduct of sorts, a law, a rule, an ethos, an ideology, what have you. They become "good" or "right".

So there it is - "right" or "good", an artificial classification of the self-interest of one or common interests of a group of highly evolved primates. If you're lucky, you get to be in a group that agrees on common interests and provides adequate room for you to pursue your self-interests.

Urgh. Dangerous ground. So I'll come out and say I am not into "relativism" and this "who am I to judge what is good just because I don't agree with it". These artificial classifications are necessary. How else would you know who the bastards were?

What's my point? I'm not sure, let me re-read what I wrote. Nope. Don't see one yet. I could go on forever but I need to wrap up, so I'll just say this - I don't think we'll ever overcome this "programming". So why am I constantly disappointed? Maybe my programming is better, and people really are bastards.