The Two Questions

I am an autodidactic philosopher.

One might ask if there were any other kind…

However, there is an academic tradition, and I do not wish to set myself at odds with it, but only to admit that I am not part of it, nor do I personally believe that such credentials are necessary, at least in the realm of philosophy.

I have read and do understand philosophers past, but my life’s work is not a critique of theirs, though I may occasionally evoke those whose work resonates with mine.

My work is a critique of the life I experienced and observed. Of myself. Of humanity. Of nature.

I seek to refine individual consciousness.

Existence is blessedly unconscious, a perfect void of chaotic possibilities, a tranquil sea of life just going on about its business unperturbed. We can experience this directly in those blissful, quiet moments when we can finally be at peace with ourselves, when we can stop and watch the world go by, when all our personal innate processes are harmonious.

In this sense, the whole as the unconscious is a form of consciousness that draws itself toward a balance.

No wonder we think we’ve gone back to the source or found God (or been attacked by the devil) when we experience ecstasy or terror! This is not to say that what we find is not real. Whether ecstasy or terror, we’ve tapped into something; but I suspect the old Brahmins knew their stuff when they admonished us to look at the Divine as

-“Neti-Neti”—“Not this, Not that”-

It may be, as some suppose, we are tasked with the responsibility to sanctify through consciousness that unconscious source from which we spring!

For beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or, as I like to say, the experience of the knower. We must suffer the pangs of consciousness, for otherwise there is nothing to behold. There is nothing to experience if we are not aware that we are experiencing it. If we do not first experience that contrast wrought by uncertainty we cannot experience the resolution of that contrast whence beauty is born.

I believe that through the process of evolution some organisms develop consciousness. It is an evolutionary adaptation, one with which I think we still fumble at best and outright abuse at worst. We use it to make value judgments about our environment, which ultimately includes other people and consciousness itself. We then try to impose on others those value judgments which best suit ourselves. This is the extent to which we have developed consciousness as a tool.

The first primates who evolved opposable thumbs probably didn’t come right out of the gate using them to their full advantage. No record of what they did exists, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that upon first discovering the uses of these dexterous digits, they used them in more detrimental than beneficial ways.

We appropriate our biological advantages toward our own destruction as often as we do our subsistence, and I will go on in this essay to explore some of the reasons why.

The two fundamental questions which pervade my philosophical discourse are

1. When mirror regards mirror, which is the reflection?

2. Who saves the sacrifice?

These might seem like silly metaphorical or rhetorical questions at first glance. Yet they arose out of years of bittersweet experience, interacting with others according to the erroneous belief that they thought as I think.

I want to step lightly here at first, as I do not want to give the impression that I consider myself superior. I have learned the hard way that I am an exception. I am not like others, and others, who do share common feelings, rarely understand that I do not share common feelings with them. They too are unaware that we do not all think alike. They too do as I did, insofar as believing that we all think pretty much alike, at least close enough for “business”.

They can afford to think that. There is just enough common feeling between common people to justify it, even though there is still so much more that distinguishes any one from another person.

But uncommon people—the exceptions—cannot afford to think this way. Though we sometimes must go along to get along, it can be like a poison to us.

Humans have a social network dependent upon compromise, within which the majority of us are subjugated to the desires of a few.

Social Convention and Moral Tradition. I will call this network “the tower”, with the underlying association being the symbol of the Blasted Tower in the Tarot.

Because it necessitates a linear hierarchy, the compromises become more bitter the farther down the tower we go. The kitchen grunts, the carpenters, the farmers, the workers. We are at the bottom.

Even though we no longer call ourselves by that name, we are slaves, and our only hope to escape slavery, we think, if we are born into the lowest social class, is to triangulate others into a position beneath us and climb the levels of the tower. We don’t know anything but the tower from the day we are born, so this is understandable.

Yet the ultimate absurdity here is that we never really escape slavery. Anywhere in the tower—even the very top!—we are enslaved, because this tower’s maintenance is dependent upon all who reside therein, and where the workers toil with their hands, the masters must toil with Machiavellian machinations and each other to maintain their own place in the hierarchy or hope to ascend.

They must also contend with the ever-present discontent of those beneath them, which can explode any time into violence.

The ones at the top know to remain locked away and hidden, lest they put a target on their back, and anyone who threatens the social order that might bring the tower crashing to the ground becomes a target to all those who earnestly believe the tower itself their only viable means of subsistence.

The only answer for one who would maintain autonomy is to go far away from the tower and risk the wilderness. One can visit the tower occasionally, barter and trade with its inhabitants, even exchange words of wisdom. But one cannot threaten the integrity of the tower without bringing ruin on oneself.

For the tower must eventually fall, and one does not want to be inside when it does.

If it seems at this point I have veered far from my original subject, this is all to the better for coming back to my first question, which is about this illusion of social order, this tower primed to fall, which is, and always has been, to shift analogies, a labyrinth of mirrors.

When mirror regards mirror, which is the reflection?

What is social interaction but the means by which the species proliferates? Why do salmon swim upstream to mate? Why does the peacock develop his gaudy but useless display of feathers? Why does the cardinal attack his own reflection?

Why do most human beings choose to go along with the crowd rather than stand against it or walk away from it?

Because it benefits them personally. Everyone and everything acts and reacts out of self-interest.

It is only those of us whose self-interest is unserved by the cultural milieu that recognize this.

Those whose self-interest is served by the cultural milieu must necessarily tell themselves that they act out of common cause, as it was the appeal to either empathy or communal protection (often grouped simultaneously under terms like “Public Health and Safety” or “National Security”) that initially goaded them to act in concert where otherwise they would have fought against each other.

So long have we reinforced this notion that we are essentially altruistic, that we perceive ourselves as such despite all the evidence to the contrary; and even if altruism was our base state, is it really altruistic if we are not choosing it?

When Ella Wheeler Wilcox penned these lines, she was, wittingly or no, offering a means to confirm my point by becoming the living proof of my assertion:

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

Sigh, it is lost on the air;

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

But shrink from voicing care.

<>

Rejoice, and men will seek you;

Grieve, and they turn and go;

They want full measure of all your pleasure,

But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

Be sad, and you lose them all,—

There are none to decline your nectared wine,

But alone you must drink life’s gall.

<>

Feast, and your halls are crowded;

Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

For a large and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Of course, I do not suggest that you try it! To give in completely to the despair which crowds together and pushes upward just beneath that dissociative giddiness that would shove it away is a form of madness which I have plumbed to the bitter bottom. It was a clarity vacuum. I never saw so clearly in my life, but I never felt so much like nothing, and was never so useless to myself. I do not regret it, but I feel that it is my sacred duty to extoll what I found there so others can avoid the trap.

We know we are almost out of the tower when we are at our lowest because we can only escape the way we came. Enter the ascetic.

There may be in the ascetic insistence on poverty and abstinence the symbol of this realization, but ideologies that reinforce ascetic practices as social mores nullify their value as such. It becomes another means for those in the upper levels of the tower to gain more from those in the lower by teaching them self-denial, rather than a means for the individual to free the self from the tower by not relying on the goods it offers—because the ascetic practice as a group activity within an institution becomes a good offered by the tower.

So which is the reflection? What is this talk of mirrors?

What people commonly call empathy is only limbic synchrony.

We are biologically primed to mirror one another so that we will cooperate. We are biologically primed to take pleasure as a reward and incentive, and pain as a punishment and disincentive. When we empathize with someone else’s pleasure, we feel this is mutual good will, but really it is mutual self-interest. When we empathize with someone else’s pain, we feel we are making a sacrifice of our own good feelings in favor of their bad ones, which still ultimately makes us feel good, the hero in our own story, the savior, the virtuous one.

In both cases, our incentive is pleasure, our goal to fulfill our own self-interest. If we once feel that our sacrifice is vain because, for whatever reason, we do not perceive the other’s response as grateful, or if the other remains in pain or upset despite our best efforts, we are not inclined to continue to help them.

If people don’t get better, or we don’t feel good about our role in helping them, we do not continue to act on behalf of those people.

It is not in our self-interest. We only have so much time.

This is completely fair.

What is unfair is when we use this story about empathy to prime others to give of themselves with no real intent or ability to reciprocate.

Selflessness is for corpses, not living, breathing human beings, and this is the real dark secret behind the archetype of Christ on the Cross. (More on that later when we deal with my second fundamental question.)

If all of society becomes nothing more than the interplay between people primed to mirror each other…

…what is real?

Not society. Society is an illusion created with mirrors. The real self lies behind the mirror, the one each of us holds up to the others in the endless, inane dance of social etiquette.

In the misty, fragmented haze of this modern spectacle, where technology has concentrated the flame of the communal campfire into bouncing lasers, and the speed and grandiosity of the spectacle itself is too much for our minds to grasp, stuck as we are in the point of view of our tribal ancestors yet constrained by a technology that has far surpassed us, we are nothing more than commodified livestock penned by the very conventions and neurological predispositions which were once the keys to our survival.

It may even be that this design has been in place longer than recorded history. As absurd as it may seem at first glance, the notion that we are the progeny of an elder race or aliens or old gods is not so far-fetched the more one digs into it. But that is a subject for another time.

Some like to believe that a “return to nature” through tribal or communal living is the answer. This would require a reduction of the population which by their own definition would constitute an atrocity. They are unconsciously acting out that aforementioned neurological predisposition to a herd mentality and rendered oblivious to the cruel facts of the matter. The scale of the human population now makes collectivism, quite ironically, untenable as a civilized answer to resource management.

Individualism in this case is just another form of collectivism, whereby under the pretense of individual liberty, we herd ourselves for the masters and tell ourselves we are pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. The two views are only opposed in the sense that our mirror image reflects an equal and opposite version of ourselves.

When we use each other as mirrors, which is the reflection?

We must break the mirrors, trusting that in so doing, we are not also breaking our selves.

It’s a lot to ask of an organism that evolves at a pace much slower than its own technology.

My purpose in this life, which I feel as a calling, a vocation in the most intense, “spiritual” sense, is to lay bare these mechanisms of human endeavor that are now so outdated and outmoded that they can lead nowhere but mass atrocity.

The irony of this, that one who relies on conclusions from empirical, material measures to deduce human nature and comment on it, should be so driven by forces within himself that he does not comprehend, is not lost on me. Yet even if those very forces were to turn out to be something “spiritual” in the most archaic sense of that term, it would still be true that these were the tools I was given to perform this task, and it is the only way I can follow through.

The way out, after all, is through, and if we find ourselves in the tower, in the matrix, in Plato’s cave, in the labyrinth of mirrors—call it what you will!—we must admit that the way through is back, and out the way we came in.

Preferably, before the Tower falls.

This brings me to my second fundamental question.

Who saves the sacrifice?

Christ on the cross says, “Forgive them, father, for they know not what they do.”

If we know not what we do, what is God asking himself to forgive us for?

Is it possible that these words were put in Christ’s mouth as part of the story of his death?

“He died for our sins.”

Did he?

Or did he die because we killed him?

Christ was an exception.

Again, I want to step lightly here. I am not insinuating in any way, shape, or form that I consider myself a Christ figure. I determined some years ago that I would rather be a scapegoat than a martyr.

I should rather wander off into the wilderness than ascend the cross. I too am an exception, but not that kind.

I observe the figure of the Christ and the way common people identify with it, and I know the dirty secret.

The dirty secret is: we killed him because he was better than us.

He was what we would never choose to be. Hell, we aren’t even sure we make choices, though we like to believe we do; but we could damn well see that the selfless one, the Christ figure, the truly, sincerely altruistic one—did make choices.

“Christ”, whoever he or she may be in whatever story is told after their death, chose to be a better person by setting themselves apart, openly objecting to the conditions inside the tower, advocating for a better existence for all. A cognate concept from the feminine end might be Joan of Arc, or, if we should like to go back farther, dear Antigone.

The scapegoat, the devil, the trickster, the dark shadow that flits in and out of the city where the tower reigns, taking his pleasure where he can while learning to thrive on as little as need be… he watched it all. Sometimes he even participated.

But the scapegoat also grew tired of the spectacle.

The trickster tried to tempt the good one away—believe it or not, for his or her own good.

The devil destroyed the tower. The people rebuilt it, and the good one helped them with his or her own hands before they once again nailed him to the cross or burnt her at the stake.

The dark shadow undermined the process by rising to the highest levels of the tower and manipulating society so as to render it so mediocre that the spectacle of the crucifixion or the burning itself would, through its complexity, be rendered too dull for the mindless inhabitants, who prefer bread and circuses.

This only hastened the crucifixion, expedited the burning, as the good one challenged the bread and circuses until the people were forced to follow through with a process they did not understand.

“It is the law!” they are told as they watch the exceptions accept their punishment. Some jeer, some cheer, some quietly fear: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It was ever the purpose of evil to redeem good. Prometheus risked his very existence to give humanity fire because he wanted to illuminate the best in humanity, not give the worst a means by which to burn the best at the stake.

Who saves the sacrifice?

As a philosopher, I am an agent of chaos. Not to be confused with a chaos agent! I explore chaos, not to cause it, but to put it in an order that suits our burgeoning needs.

I disrupt automation, which is the weak point wherein evil insinuates itself. This is my sacred duty, though I may sometimes be construed in this drama as the devil himself! Irony much?

If I act kindly or generously, it was a choice I made—not to ingratiate myself or save myself from harm, but because I truly would rather give the self away than fight to keep it. What, after all, is it worth to me?

Therefore, that Christ figure, I admire and respect.

The only reason the devil, who is smarter and stronger than the combined might of the masses, cannot through all his exertions, save Christ from the Cross, is because Christ won’t allow him to.

Christ chooses the cross.

Does it ever change the people for the better?

This remains to be seen.

Now take all this pompous allegory and realize, dear reader, that I am speaking directly about us; that teeming mass, that devil, that Christ, in each one of us.

Who saves the sacrifice?

WHO?