Notes From Oblong [Part 1.1]

I do not believe there is any reason for my claims to be rational, it’s a convention I’d rather do away with, deeply unnatural as it is. Rationality is just another value, that’s how I see it. And what reason does man esteem himself in values: to confirm his identity as something. Here’s my first claim, that the lot of us live on a foundation of lies. In the same way that the lie of television is its supposed sincerity, or the lie of science is that it seeks to understand. Life is a game of cutting losses, not gleaning victories. I’ve never once felt as if the things I do in life have gained me anything - it’s all just further shielding from the expanse of things we are persistently made aware of. In that sense we’re no better than the average crack addict, just looking for our fix, neither here nor there in the meanwhile. We’re all trying to find impossible wholes in our life. Boundless pleasure, God, transcendence, peace, comfort, knowledge, whatever. I don’t think we can exist without it. The sciences and spirituality are just methods of engineering more robust lies for all I can see. Same goes for philosophers. The purpose of this document is the same, yet another lie to stop myself from dissolving.

Hope is the general principle keeping people alive, not satisfaction. Even a person in relative comfort would wither if you took away their hope. We are all dependent on process and motion, after all. Stall the flow of human activity, its search for greater gratification, well... I suppose it’s not too bad to live in a lie, however crude it be. But it’s bad to lie to yourself about it. If I tell myself that all humans are equal, and affirm myself with common platitudes, it only serves to increase my misery. There’s only so much a person can feel injury over inherent imbalances and inequalities in the world. It’s the illusion of other possibilities that accounts for the second arrow in the wound. As humans, we’ve done a great service to ourselves by advancing technology. A great deal of us wish that we were not so aware of the world all the time. So I take my hat off to all of those that invented modern entertainment, the theatre of politics, and the ever-flowing stream of gossip. There is nothing quite like modern discourse in the world, the collective participation of watching humanity’s ejaculate dripping on the infrastructure of reality and discussing it.