This human coop or human farm is owned by cruel and infernal beings and they must be laughing at us all the time.
This is very profound. It is said that those of us who are most paranoid may be the most aware.
Is there a way to flip the script on the infernal beings who are laughing at our anguish, despair, and confusion?
Let's say, suppose they think the way to get me to want to commit suicide is to convince me that I have insufficient memory, or that I never knew what I thought I knew?
I once entertained such a paranoid idea, that after losing my position as maintenance worker (low level state slave), my "success" in returning to college and getting the degree might have given me a little too much self-confidence, and so I had to be dragged through the mud to be put back in my place: homelessness, being placed in environments where I was likely to succumb to heavy drinking and smoking krack - do you know these types of places?
Anyway, besides all that, in order to receive assistance from the government for housing, food, and "allowance", being required to get on a van each day and transported to "day programs" where we were treated like we were mentally deficient. The whole process may have been designed to fill us with doubt about our actual identity. We were coerced into taking psychiatric medications and told every day not to drink alcohol, which only made us want to drink alcohol that much more.
What I am saying is that, how we feel about ourselves at any given time may be very tenuous. It has so much to do with how we are perceived, how we are "classified", "categorized".
So how might we flip the script on those who may be taking pleasure in witnessing our distress and confusion?
Maybe we begin to doubt that we even know who we really are.
This might explain why I want to start over with mathematics. I want to see just how difficult and challenging the material was that I was studying as a teenager so that I might have more respect for why I was so filled with doubt. Suppose I still have some mental blocks? If we suspect there are those who take great pleasure in witnessing us gradually go insane over the decades, then a way to flip the script might be to consider the possibility that we are in fact insane, that our tormentors have proved to be too clever for us, and have ultimately mystified us and have colonized our minds.
I know, this is a victim's mentality. How would this help us to flip the script?
Well, for me, it might mean calling myself stupid or braindead. It might mean imagining that some cruel and infernal beings are shooting radioactive beams into my brain to make it more difficult for me to study. Am I suggesting we become more paranoid?
I am saying that we have these narratives in our heads about our lives, about who we are, about our experiences, etc. How do we know it has all happened as we remember?
How would I ever remember anything I might have looked at in a book 35 years ago, especially if nothing in my life required me to ever recall or look up that knowledge?
The way I am flipping the script is, now that I know there is no practical use for pure mathematics, and now that I see how I have turned out to be a useless eater, one who thinks too much to be made useful to society, I can go back and really try to get into all the useless mathematical concepts I might have not taken too seriously, even if this means hunting down old vintage high school books that have long since gone out of print since they do not teach with that kind of formality and rigor these days.
Maybe feeling stupid will make me smarter, whereas feeling smart makes one more manipulable.
We each have our own peculiarities.
Have you ever considered the possibility that Life itself, Mother Nature even, may be this cruel and infernal being?
I have been in the woods in the rain and felt mocked by Nature itself.
Society ("God") and Nature overpower and humiliate us.
Maybe the only real way to take away the delight we imagine our tormentors enjoy at our expense is to just be resigned to the certainty that we will be ground into dust in the end.
Again, I guess I can forever only speak for myself, but I suspect I will worry much less about how little I understand if I just become resigned to becoming less and less intelligent in my own eyes, to wake up from all delusions and just be this distraught living creature who wants to understand some things that no one really seems to care about.
I get frustrated putting up posts and fence and building something to raise a vegetable garden. We want the garden so we might save money on food over the summer, harvest some tomatoes for sauce ... some spinach, zucchini, cucumbers ... and - do you know how depressing it is to spend so much money on the posts, the wire fence, the lumber to raise ground up out of water? And then also to realize I need fasteners and a saw to cut the wood? I get discouraged easily and very frustrated. Everything seems difficult and just not worth doing.
What is this planet Earth? A laboratory where we are the experiment, a zoo, a madhouse, a slaughterhouse? All of them? I hear some say that they are happy.
And it is not just our circumstances that makes our lives so difficult. The reason why Schopenhauer's views are so powerful for me has to do with the way he has discovered this anxiety and frustration built into the very fabric of existence itself. In other words, there is no escape. There is no salvation from this.
The reason why Holden and I find some comfort in this comfortless philosopher is because it kind of saves us from going completely insane. When we see the world through the eyes of Schopenhauer's great brain, our frustrations, insecurities, disillusionment, and outright horror begins to MAKE SENSE. We are not these freaks which the cruel and infernal "conventional" and "well-adapted" make us out to be. They also experience life to the dregs, but they are too frightened to talk about it, to admit it. They fear the insane asylum. They do not want to expose themselves as being vulnerable in any way!
It takes a certain type of courage to contemplate upon the world as it truly is, and not just the way we wish it were.
I like Holden's theory about the impossibility of making any progress when it comes to mathematics. We may understand something for a long time as long as we are thinking about it all the time; but should we not focus on it for awhile, we forget it, and if we want to understand it again, we will have to think about it for a long time again.
There is so much delusion and self-deception on the individual level, and hence, so much farce, fraud, and corruption in human society.
In another age, people like us who just blurt out how we feel, who question the lies on which the social order is founded upon, would have been crucified or burned alive or sacrificed to the Head God of the Mother Culture.
The way I rebel is I study math as much as I can stand it, and I try to get used to feeling stupid or uncertain. Why? Because I value inner-honesty more than I value "self-esteem" or "false pride".
The stupider I allow myself to feel, the more I will appreciate learning if ever so little!
On the other hand, I suspect that those who walk around feeling they are very clever and have little to learn might find it impossible to think critically when necessary, or may not be on the look out for stupid mistakes. At least I am intimate with how easy it is to make stupid errors and to do stupid things. If this can be ascribed to carelessness, than over-estimating one's competence or capacity makes us more likely to overlook such errors. It could be that I am involved in my best thinking when I have this "feeling of being stupid", for it is only then that I am breaking things down into excrucuating detail.
I wish I could help you to laugh about how unnecessary our suffering is. I don't mean to suggest we take the horror of existence lightly, and I am not saying there is anything funny about our pain, confusion, or despair. Maybe there is a liberating kind of laughter, the kind of laughter of a madman who sees that our suffering is unnecessary, that we do not need to exist. Life is unnecessary, and so it's all unnecessary.
Sure, it's pointless (and unnecessary) to try to save money on food by building a garden that costs more to build than the vegetables that we grow in it would cost in the market place! Maybe there is an unquantifiable thrill of eating vegetables you see growing from seeds.
Sure, it is pointless (and unnecessary) to study mathematics that will never be used to earn one dollar or to grow one tomato (except for basic geometry when putting up fence and spacing the plants). In general it is pointless (and unnecessary) that we exist at all, that the cosmos exists. None of this is necessary. How does it continue to propagate itself? Our own lives are our biggest problem to us!
And so I want to engage in useless activities like thinking about the absurdity of it all.
Holden escapes the horror by reading horror literature.
I escape the nightmarish sense of ignorance by facing my own ignorance, a little at a time.
It makes me more patient with others. There are many who prefer not to know, many who hate anything having to do with "book learning". In fact, it is considered "cool" not to want to learn about certain things.
I guess I prefer to be very uncool, to be unhappy.
That's it! The trick is, the way to flip the script on the cruel and infernal beings who mock our vain and futile struggles, is to prefer misery and unhappiness, to be resigned, you know?
Take care Raul and Holden and Maughan and whoever else has the patience to read such crazy talk that I write here.
Peace. May you all find some inner peace and some reprieve in this life.
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