“Come to terms with death.
Thereafter, anything is possible.”

If there are to be heroes, perhaps it’s better that they be dead ones, since it is relatively impossible for them to disappoint. This particular candidate, a good one, met his end when a car met a tree before I was born. But really the reason that he’s here with us today is the quote.

Sheldon Solomon uses it at the end of his TED talk, which I’m going to sorta ummarize for you next.

From the start it’s clear that this guy did a lot of acid back in the day, which isn’t a thing I can criticize anybody about without being hypocritical. In contrast to my situation though, he gives zero fucks about people’s perceptions about whether he can dress himself, and I’ll bet there’s daily weed happening too. On the better-than-me side though, he was instrumental in crafting a really interesting sub-discipline and academic quasi-movement, which I’ve never come close to.

Enough prologue.

The first quote is from Thomas Hardy, and it goes:
"If a way to the better there be, it exacts a look at the worst."
If you want things to be better, you have to look honestly at the existential shithole we’re in, and have been in since the end of hunter-gathering.

Solomon sees The Worst, and cause for pessimism, in four unhappy human facts.

• War: Genocide is the human normal, and when we’re not committing it actively, we are brutally subjugating "in-house inferiors" (so smallpox blankets and slavery in America). Nukes and WMD mean that we’re likely to be the first species to prune ourselves from the evolutionary tree.

• Environmental destruction: of which ‘climate’ is of course only a piece.

• Capitalism: or just obsessive consumption, the relentless and mindless pursuit of more money and junk. This of course means big greed on the part of the plutocracy, but I argue that it’s worse than that because it lives in all of us; see previous posts.

• Psychopathology: Maybe a result of the above. One in eight Americans is clincally depressed and one in three adults will be at some point. Ten to twenty percent are addicted to drugs including alcohol.

What is the cause of these four horsemen of the Apocolypse?

Well, like all critters, we have an instinct toward self-preservation, but unlike most of them we’ve also evolved the capacity for abstract symbolic thinking. Which means we can imagine. And sometimes transform imagination into reality, which is fucking amazing.

We are the part of the creation that also Creates, and that is the source of our wild evolutionary success. Parenthetically, we are also the species who imagine we Exist–we are Conscious; we are Self-Aware. (I would shortcut some of this and just say that the same ability to imagine we exist means we can also imagine the day when we won’t.)

Solomon says the two unique human emotions are Awe and Dread, and he draws a loose parallel here–Creation and Awe ("It is literally awesome to be alive and to know it"), Mortality Awareness and Dread ("the awareness that like all living things you are of finite duration", and worse still, you expiration can happen any time, like Camus and the car crash, eh).

Biologically, you’re "a breathing piece of defacating meat that is no more enduring or significant than a lizard or a potato".

Try staying aware of that habitually … (No really, I’m thinking that we have to, personally.)

Being alive and knowing it, and more significantly being destined to die and knowing it, is a rational cause for overwhelming and paralyzing Dread. Naturally.

We try to imagine ways to get past that dread.

Today we call these ways … Culture, as in our culture (the civilized ones), and their culture (the savages).

Cultures are the collective strategy of the group for managing the threat of dread. We imaginatively construct, maintain, and share beliefs as antidotes to the dreadful reality that things, including us, die.

"Minimizing anxiety by giving us a sense that we’re persons of value." As opposed to lizard potatoes.

(Fuck yeah, this is where it gets good.
If you want to die free, you have to get over the addiction to thinking you’re more valuable than a lizard, even with your big-deal creative engine of imagination and shit. Because that addiction is just another painkilling crutch getting in the way of feeling the awful or rather dreadful truth.
In Buddhistic terms you have to cut through the veil of illusion and let go of the ego in order to be free, right? And this is the studied Western reasoning about exactly WHY.
Solomon may not be a hero, but he is a holy fool)

Cultures attempt to rationalize mortal dread away by:

offering a genesis story, big bangs or seven-day weekends

offering prescriptions for appropriate conduct, and,

most importantly, offering a hope of immortality–literally as in heaven or reincarnation, or symbolically as in having kids or amassing capital or creating the kind of legacy that will outlive you, scientifically or Artistically (and oh god has that last one been the version of immortality i’ve swallowed most greedily)

"When we embrace cultural worldviews and glean self-esteem from perceiving that we’re meeting or exceeding the standards of value associated with them, this keeps mortal terror at bay."

(So freeing oneself from a sense of Worthiness and yes even self-esteem is the radical notion at the heart of this line of thinking.
Is it too a cultural construct, and does that matter?)

Religion (including science) and Art are the way to Awe, and thus are the best things we’ve ever done.

But just as with culture more generally, there’s a steep dark side to the awesomeness.

To encounter a competing culture is to be reminded of death. Our death-denying beliefs are less effective for the purpose of reducing anxiety if someone else’s different beliefs even exist. (Russia in the cold war. Japan in the nineties. China and Iran and even the Mexicans today.)

In Borneo they believed that the earth was created from the side of a coconut. But we know they are ignorant savages, and that a bearded Jewish sky puppet created the earth and everything else in the universe in His workshop one week six thousand years ago, or forty-two thousand or something, whatever; we’re right! Because His heaven really, really needs to exist for us, and hell too, for the Borneos.

Sometimes when they can’t be laughed and belittled out of the way, the enemy needs to be cleansed of its culture though symbolic genocide (hello, Indian School, with the mother tongue forbidden) or literal genocide (rather too many examples of that, but let’s say Hitler, why not … I would say there are in-betweens too, like when mass incarceration is overwhelmngly a black, brown, and poor thing; race warfare, class warfare).

At this point Solomon goes all social-psychologist and provides experimental data in anecdote form to illustrate the point, and incidentally tosses off a reference to right-wing Americans and left-wing Americans as examples of competing cultural tribes.

" … when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men’s heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind." —George Bernard Shaw.

Long ago, we turned aside from the Nature all around us and imagined, constructed, created the Supernatural, a place that exists beyond the Natural, a less satisfying and more dreadful place where everything eventually dies.
Nature becomes a wrongheaded culture that can, and ultimately should, be pillaged and used up for the glory of this culture and the ruling tribe, which of course includes you and me. (Your Mercedes and my Toyota are emblematic of this phenomenon.)

He’s demonstrating how first War is produced by death anxiety. Then how the destruction of Nature is produced by the same dread. And then how consumer capitalism comes into being via the exact same mechanism and for the same reason.

He compares that to the more rationalistic conceptions of Economics and finds them wanting, compared to his own psychological, dread-based model.

“The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! –Tennesee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The fourth element, Psychopathology.

Consider whether the prevailing standars of human value are attainable for the average person in a given cultural framework.
For men here and now, tthe preailing cultural standard is lots of wealth and power. For women it’s still lots of youth, beauty and desirability.

You don’t have to believe in that shit to be depressed if you don’t measure up to it completely. You may rationally "suffer from low self-esteem" anyway.

Which is an interesting and quite contrasting view of the earlier mention of self-esteem … needs some teasing apart.

In conclusion. We’re at a crossroads. We’re killing ourselves. I hope I’m wrong about all this. Here, I’m throwing you a hope bone. It’s not very big or plausible.

But either way …

What Camus said.

---

That was working hard for a daily spilling. I did it for mostly selfish reasons, but I hope you get something gemlike out of it too.

One last thing I’ll mention is that in the YouTube "Up Next" suggestions, I’m looking at people I’ve encountered happily before, like Lawrence Lessig and Gabor Mate’.

I think this randomly encounterd Sheldon fellow is a peer, and therefore every bit as valuable as a potato.