| the blog of human failure
It’s really only in my happiest moments that I consider committing suicide. Do I hope to go out gloriously and on top? Is it my fear that the rest of life will be a beige disappointment? I think I probably just get overwhelmed with the excitement of success and confuse self destruction with some kind of fireworks display of the soul. Also, of course, I would enjoy the petty little irony of, “Oh, he’s always killing himself when he’s happiest. What an unimpeachable enigma that Jason is. Let me be the last to have sex with him warm…blah, blah…”.
The conflict between almost every religion and suicide is confusing to the point of being suspicious in my view. What almost certainly happened is that a religion was set up, pick your favorite, exchanging good deeds for everlasting happiness at some point after death. A lot of people probably got their good-to-bad-deed batting average comfortably over .500 and then killed themselves immediately – wisely inferring that they had short circuited the god machine and gamed their way into heaven. Add that to the otherwise nice seeming people who were just sad and decided to kill themselves and religion had a mighty big problem on its hands. Suicide was declared against the rules. I hope the people who had the foresight to harikari before the law was on the books got grandfathered into heaven. It’s like date raping in the ‘70s. I mean she agreed to go out with you right? What did she expect? You had to be a sucker not to do it. No reason the crafty should be penalized retroactively. Otherwise we stifle innovation.
But does anybody know? Is there a religion where you still get into heaven, or whatever the positive equivalent is, even after committing suicide? I can image it not even being dependant on good deeds. Once you can do 100 pushups, and they’re not messing around – they’re talking about perfect form here, you are technically allowed to kill yourself and still go to heaven. Pushups aside, there must be a religion where you’re allowed to kill yourself. And if you’re allowed to kill yourself, well that’s almost tacit encouragement to surely kill yourself. What the hell are you waiting around for? Don’t you have faith in BimBop the Sky Spider? The best part about this religion is that they must be taking converts. They’re going through fresh bodies like a bowl of Cheese Nips. I wouldn’t be surprised if there used to be such a religion and then another religion killed them off, figuring that everyone would convert and then kill themselves – again back-dooring their way into heaven. I hope there’s still one still around, just in case I start getting religious in middle age. It would give me a special pleasure to sit in the cheaters section of heaven, laughing with my comrades at all the suckers.
As a final thought, wouldn’t it be funny if the point of life was to kill yourself? You die old of natural causes, get to heaven, and god is like, “Uh, sorry stupid, no dice dancing at this party. How obviously painful was I supposed to make it? Better luck next time coward.” I take much more comfort from that scenario.
Hi. When you were 18 did you ever try to develop your own life philosophy? I did. It was called Perspectivism. When you see Ayn Rand mentioned in the first paragraph you know I was on to something good. Enjoy!
An Outline of Perspectivism
Perspectivism is somewhat an amalgamation of several different preexisting philosophies and one theology, or anti-theology as it were. The first inspiration would be Objectivist philosophy as created by Ayn Rand. The ideals I find particularly appealing from that concentration are rationalization being the basis behind which all decisions are made and man being an end unto himself. I believe that the only true goal in life is happiness and the only way to achieve this happiness is to act in one’s own best interest at all times. This does not mean I condone a life of hedonism but rather a life of feeling satisfaction through personal achievement while neither taking from others or having others take from me.
My personal philosophy is, at its core, a map towards finding personal happiness and achieving satisfaction from life. I believe that the way to accomplish this is to put my own happiness and satisfaction as the goal towards which I strive. In doing this I am forced to decide things that will make me happy and the goals I truly want achieve and move toward fulfilling them. With these goals as my only focus I will not feel the emotional strain of achieving the unwanted goals of others and inversely will not hurt others by taking from them what they do not truly wish to give. I also agree with Objectivist philosophy on the idea of capitalism being the best economic system under which all are treated as equal and others are not forced to care about others but only forced to take care of themselves. Man’s only true interest is his own survival and the survival of the people he cares about. To ask him to work for survival of others has a twofold result of him not caring as much as he could about his work and therefore not producing to the best of his ability. To me, it is a fallacy that there is a limited amount to be produced. There is in fact an infinite amount to be produced. People however, can only be motivated into maximum production if what they are producing benefits them directly and honestly.
There is one place where I disagree with Objectivism. The philosophy concludes that existence is objective and man’s role is to perceive existence as rationally as he can. It further states that man’s perspective cannot alter existence, only view it irrationally. I would argue instead, as the Post-Modernists would, not that perception can change existence as it sees fit, but rather that an individual perception predicates existence. It is unimportant to me whether men look at the same world and perceive it in many different ways or if they look at very different worlds and actually perceive them all quite similarly. If it is the individual’s good that matters to the individual, then his unique perspective must be from where that sense of good originates. It does not matter whether man’s perspective creates the world or the objective world creates the man. I live through the perspective of my individual self and not through the perspective of the objective world, therefore I must see the existence of an objective world as predicated upon the existence of myself.
The second philosophy through which my personal philosophy was gleaned is Existentialism. This is a philosophy that further states that life is an end in itself. The ideas I find specifically interesting in Existentialism are that man is responsible for his actions, that there does exist a general malaise that plagues man in his natural state, and that man must either find satisfaction in his own existence or he will not find satisfaction at all. Responsibility for ones actions is tied directly into my ideal of individual perception. To take responsibility is to prove your own existence. It does not matter whether we truly exist or not, we are working from the perception that we exist, therefore to question it is meaningless. This much relates to the question of free will. Some say free will exists because it is obvious that we can do as we please. Others say that free will is an illusion created by a combination of terms set from birth and the nature of our environment.
In my opinion this is not a point worth arguing. The universe as we understand it is infinite. Even if it is not infinite we perceive it to be infinite because from our perspective as humans on earth it is. This means that there are an infinite number of natural factors that are affecting the earth and the people who live on it in an infinite number of ways. If our actions are predicated upon an infinite number of random natural factors, then we can only perceive our actions to be done upon our free will because there is no way to otherwise decipher the infinite number of random natural effect. Conversely if all of our actions are predestined then they would have had to be predestined an infinite amount of time ago creating an infinite timeline of creation into the future. The point I’m making is that because both scenarios end in the same result and neither scenario can be proven, it is meaningless to try to discover a conclusion. Do humans have free will? The answer is that it doesn’t matter whether we objectively have free will – from the perspective of the individual we have free will, so we must therefore take responsibility for our actions.
The second premise of man feeling malaise in his natural states needs to be explicated in order to be understood correctly. Man’s goal in life is happiness. If this is his goal, then he cannot exist in a natural state of happiness otherwise there would be nothing to aspire towards. This natural state that man is in would thought to be neutral in feeling being that nothing is positively or negatively affecting the individual but it is not. Man’s natural state is in a gentle malaise that presses on his unconscious. There is a thin layer of unhappiness that blankets man in this natural state, unsettling him and disrupting his equilibrium in the slightest way. This state must first and foremost be accepted consciously. It is this inherent uneasiness that encourages us to seek happiness and achievement in the first place. If man was naturally neutral emotionally, then he could be comfortable without happiness. He would have no reason to seek it again and again because he could rest comfortably in his natural state. In fact, man can not rest comfortable is his natural state. He must always strive for happiness because it inherently eludes him. My final observation in Existentialism’s effect on Perspectivism is that man must find satisfaction in his own existence.
“And that, children, is the story of the strength of a bond of friendship between two men,” said Jeffery Sloss. He was sitting in front of a row of children during story hour at the pediatric ward of Oschner Medical Clinic in New Orleans, LA.
“But wait a minute Mr. Sloss,” said little Danny Phife. “That story doesn’t make any sense. If they were flying from Ohio to California then how did they end up on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean?”
“Hmm,” said Sloss. “I think the pilot was taking a detour to Hawaii. But that’s not really what’s important in the story.”
“Why did the pilot want to go to Hawaii?” asked little Sally Lambert.
“I think he left his keys there. You’re really missing the point here, kids. It’s about a life time bond between…”
“And you never explained why the plane crashed,” injected little Mike Bradbury. “Isn’t that important? And also why were there goats on a tropical island in the Pacific? Did the goats swim there or something? And who the heck counts jelly beans for a living?”
“Ah, you crazy kids with your AIDS and your chemotherapy,” said Sloss smiling. “The story is about friendship and discovering yourself. You can’t read into the details so literally.”
Just then a nurse came into the reading room and stopped in shock when she saw Sloss there reading to the children.
“What the hell are you doing here, Sloss?” the nurse almost screamed, to the delight of the children. “The judge told you after your last pedophilia conviction that you can’t come in here anymore. Why don’t you go home and molest your own kids. Either that or take it up to the geriatrics on the eighth floor.”
“Oh Miss Claudia,” said Sloss. “You know my children are already dead.” They both had a good laugh at that as the other children glared at each other nervously. Jeffrey waved to the kids one final time and walked out the door, never to return. Nurse Claudia sat down in the red plastic chair previously occupied by Jeffrey and grimaced.
“Ah gross, it’s all sticky,” she whispered. She settled in reluctantly and the children looked up at her soft yet imposing frame. “Alright kids, now who wants to hear a real story?”
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