Wickedness makes life worth living.

 

 

One of the problems with the whole "good guys vs. bad guys" thing is that it's mostly the wicked things that make life worth living.

Philosophy is a wicked thing.  A philosopher questions, and a question is already a kind of rebellion.  Moral philosophy is a bit of an oxymoron: a philosopher questions the mores of her society, and to do so means, at least at some small, abstract level, to stand outside of these mores. True, many would-be philosophers lack the boldness to be logically rigorous, and to take their questions to the end, hiding behind moral scruples.  And then they wonder why they cannot figure out the meaning of life.  No wonder: for the goody two-shoes, life has no meaning.

Aesthetics are all a little wicked.  Art cannot be amoral - art should be immoral.

Laughter is a little bit wicked - or at least, the best humor is wicked.  Laughter and horror- these two are intertwined in strange ways, that are not fully captured in the simple word "surprise," but you catch a glimpse of the mystery of their intertwining in the word "hysterics".  When you're "losing it," in "uproarious" laughter, there's a kind of demonic vertigo, where down may be up, up may be sideways, and for a moment we are kicked loose from the illusory little order where we waste the rest of our lives.

Even friendship is a bit of a wicked thing.  Anyone who has truly been friends with another person knows this.  Friendship is not the same as universal love.  Friendship is a little bit mean.  Friends are people that we laugh with - people around whom we feel safe enough to expose our twisted universes - including some inevitable rivalry and conflicting emotions and maybe a little ball-busting (is there a non-gender-specific term for ball-busting?).  The jealousies and gossipy fractal complexities are too tangled to ever settle the question of the difference between a friend and an enemy, but at bottom there's such an capricious arbitrariness to it - why did you end up with this person, out of the billions of other people out there?  It's a bias and a privilege - and an imposed obligation - and it's profoundly unfair.  Wonderfully unfair.

Family is just flat-out evil.

Love is the most wicked thing of all.  People talk about "peace and love" as if the two things went together but love is incompatible with peace.  Love is a fire.  It consumes everything.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liquefactionism

Image
“To Dissolve Man” An Investigation into the Liquefactionist Party In the 21st century, we will have to deal both with the odious Liquefactionists and with a confused and reactionary anti-Liquefactionism, which is far more apparent and obviously horrifying. I borrow the term “Liquefactionist Party” from William S. Burroughs, who writes about the Liquefactionists in the “Parties of Interzone” section of Naked Lunch - which, as a political policy guide, is unmatched in its insight and accuracy.  He writes that, “ The Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption. ”  He goes on: “It will be immediately clear that the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe.” Paradoxically, Burroughs goes on to tell us that “Liquefactionists in general know what the score is.”  If they know the score, how can they be dupes?  Perhaps thi
Read more

Why Capitalism is Ending

Image
THE PRODUCTIVITY BOMB Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hard
Read more

Why Ayn Rand was Wrong

  It is a pet theory of mine that the "greatness" or "importance" of a philosopher is mostly determined by that philosopher's subsequent degree of influence on a government leader.  Would we still talk about Socrates, if his student Critias had not taken over Athens as the leader of the Dictatorship of the Thirty?  Would we talk about Aristotle, had he not tutored Alexander, who later became Alexander the Great and took over a vast part of the ancient world?  Would we remember Rousseau, had not Robespierre declared him "divine"?  Or Locke and Montesquieu, had not the founders of the United States revered them?  The esteem given to the philosophy by professional professors within the academy matters less, and its internal coherence, or insight, or truth matters less still.  By this measure, Ayn Rand is, unfortunately, the most important philosopher of the 20th century.   Even though she is barely noticed by philosophy departments, Ayn Rand is massively
Read more