Funny.
Funny how a whole society can be based on an idea.
A thought, a word. A thing that brings with itself meaning and expression and a being. A substance. A life that becomes something where once there was nothing. There is an idea. A terrible idea. A terrible, terrifying idea. A horrendous idea that I cannot even begin to consider seriously. It is so frightening.
It began four hundred years ago in a little town in a mountainous region of a backwater village in Austria.
I remember reading Mark Twain’s, “The Mysterious Stranger” long ago when I was an impressionable, narcissistic teenager. It was a story about a young boy named Theodore who lived in a mountain village in Austria. He was visited one day by a boy who claimed to be an angel called Satan, named after his uncle, who took him through an absurd tour of human religion and society, cruelty and torture, ultimately showing him how contradictory and randomly cruel his world was and revealing in the end that he, Theodore, was actually God Almighty and the only conscious entity in the universe.
Theodore had been imagining this whole world to fill his time, with its wars and cruelty meted out haphazardly, its heaven and hell arbitrarily assigned, its torture, its kings and queens and its empires and grand sagas, its time and space, its befores and afters, its joys and ecstasies and all that ambiguity, and all of its bizarre inanity a haunting of his own mind. It was all a dream. A sick, tormented dream. And a dream containing a dream within a dream and dreams all the way down. Nothing more. No dreams at the end. No bottom. Just. Nothing. It was a game of solitaire to while away the time in eternity.
The story ends with Theodore waking up in a cold vacuum with Satan’s last admonition ringing in his head, “Next time, dream a more pleasant dream.”
...
Wow. That’s like old Mark’s gone seriously off his nut, three loopie loops around the bend, and substantially down the rabbit hole. Fur shury sure. Ya? That was really… strange… and narcissistic... Not to mention impressionable… And altogether typical teenage behavior for the long ago of the nineteen sixties. People were allowed to think strange things back then. Read strange books. Consider strange ideas. Tip across irregular ditches. Wander out on strange paths to strange fields feasting on strange fodder of strangeness… Strange was the way of the land back then. Well, I guess they hadn’t noticed so they couldn’t stop us. It was a wobbly time, it was. It was strange.
And oddly Cartesian, don’t you think? With his whole, “I think therefore I am,” ism, and all. You know, Descartes is kind of, sort of, the founder of modern narcissistic thought, age of reason, enlightenment, we’re better than the rest of the world, I think it so there it is, me too, western teleological philosophy era, and all.
Maybe they were on to something, Descartes and Twain. The poison of modernity.
Rene Descartes, as you must know, introduced us to the idea that man can understand his environment through observation, experimentation, and the stone cold notion that nothing exists that we can’t observe, discover, and understand in our own little grey-brains. “I think therefore I am,” is the same thing as, “I understand, therefore it exists.” Along with Sir Francis Bacon he is a pillar of modern thought. We think the way we do today because they both told us how to do so back then. They thought therefore we are. That is our bedrock. That is our foundation of stone and adamant.
I have no problem with the philosophy. Indeed, it has been very successful over the past 400 years. It was responsible for the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the printing press and its snooty child: Propaganda. And I’m sure pornography quickly followed. As well as a new phenomenon: Book burning. Several popular revolutions followed which were then one upped by reigns of terror and severe, hideous dictatorships, but never mind. Actions have consequences. Severe actions have severe consequences. Earth shaking actions more so. Do the math.
The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, factory towns and industrial serfdom, and many, many wars and succeeding realms of fascism, bolshevism, workers rebellions, Jacobins, purges, terrorism, and the ironic rise of the information state and social totalitarian control on the back of Gutenberg’s unwanted, unintended snot nosed child: The Internet. They noticed that we were thinking, one book at a time. One blog at a time. One fleck of gold in a sea of troll belched dross at a time. And they put a stop to it. Can’t have none of that thinking here. We traded the sale of indulgences for the salesmanship of celebrities. They think, therefore do we. The hive speaks as one.
And the world shapes itself in our image. Like it or not.
So now we think we are a certain way, and so we are. And the universe continues to be itself, as it has always been, untouched, untouchable. Outside. Wherever that is. Who is the wiser?
Whatever you think, whatever you are, whatever you may believe about the universe or any machinations of science and technology you might use to describe it, it exists solely and exclusively in your own head. You do not think thoughts outside of your own plane, circle, sphere, quantum tesseract, brain matter, or any other context of your own experience. You do not speak for other people. For men. For women. For the world, for your own culture, people, race, tribe, political party, or family, or even the person next to you. None of those things exist.
You only speak for one person: Yourself. The speck in your eye is yours alone and the only one you have any chance to dig out. Dig we must. Deal with it.
You are it, in a matter of thinking. Whatever happens in the universe happens in your our brain stem. You are your own solipsist thinking machine dreaming of a world that does not exist in your own mind that also does not exist in an eternity that comes from and goes to nowhere. So thinks nobody and therefore it is. Make of it what you wish. It is your own heaven. It is your own hell.
Next time, dream a more pleasant dream.
Descartes tell us so. He thinks, therefore he is. We think, therefore we are. I don’t know what to make of it all.
Funny how a whole society can be based on an idea.
Funny.
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