“Ever wanted to do more?” some commercial by a for-profit university asked me.
Actually, I’ve always wanted to do LESS.
I can’t even watch ASMR without some jackass telling me that I’ve got 40lbs of excess shit in my bowels. Is that something I should be worried about? I already spend enough of my life on a toilet.
“Wanna invest in crypto?”
No thanks. Sports betting seems like a lot cooler way to lose money.
“Use my promo code to get one month free at Manscaped.com!”
Since when did men start shaving their balls?
Do people actually find this shit revolutionary or liberating? Any limp dick bastard with enough cash and a camera can convince enough people that some halfassed product manufactured from a sweatshop in Juarez is worth your hard earned money.
So why don’t you try sending some of that money my way?
While I was reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, I was introduced to the term credo quia absurdum, translated as “I believe because it is absurd.”
The phrase is usually attributed to Tertullian in reference to Christian belief.
However, I have said many times before that the mechanism of religious belief has been franchised out to other forms of belief, specifically in the political realm. This process is exacerbated by constant internet usage.
Naturally, this causes further consternation within civilization because we know intellectually that the internet isn’t real, but our relationship and understanding of the real world is constantly being shaped by it.
When this contradiction is pointed out, there’s an almost violent psychological reaction to it because it undermines our entire understanding of self and society. And to maintain this flawed understanding, we double down on our patently false assumptions.
Therefore this “credo quia absurdum” becomes the de facto mode of political/religious discourse.
As we fall further down the technological abyss, bombarded by competing information and ideas, we struggle to make sense of anything.
With an endless stream of movies, television, videos, and literature, we perceive the world through a dramatic prism, unable to grasp that the universe is impartial to our reasoning.
When confronted with this cognitive dissonance, we double down. And the opportunists in the media are all too happy to entertain our delusions.
In a sense, we are living in the “matrix.”
But perhaps this has always been true, even prior to the Internet. Maybe to live in a cultivated society means to live in a “matrix”, and no one wants to admit this.
Because of this, there rises either futile sentiments of cultural superiority, or need to “break free” from the restraints of society. But they’re both fantasies…fantasies that fuel our collective imagination.
Philosophers and theorists have failed to understand this: “the dramatic progression” that underpins our understanding. This is how nationalists can assert dominance, or how Christians and Marxists share an almost identical eschatological worldview despite being seemingly opposed. We view the world through a dramatic lens, and there are bad actors out there that try to entertain it.
All of this lies in our subconscious, and we may not be able to escape it. Being a part of this human collective is what makes us…human. So maybe the real political objective is not more theory, but to take from Sigmund Freud: we need to “sublimate well”.
Some might argue that’s Machiavellian, or utopian, or Orwellian, or naive, or overly optimistic, over pessimistic, liberal, conservative, or whatever.
With the Kantian blockage…or the inability to perceive the universe in its total, final form…it becomes difficult to understand that multiple truths can simultaneously exist.
Or maybe none of it is true.
It doesn’t matter. Stay pissed off if you choose. The universe goes on.
Furthermore, I’m not some postmodern lunatic claiming that real truth doesn’t exist and therefore it’s pointless to speculate on the nature of it.
What I AM saying is that Immanuel Kant was RIGHT. And philosophers from his day onward have been pissed off because of it.
Kant claimed we can’t know things “in themselves”. Meaning we can’t perceive objects and nature in their true form. We can only perceive “phenomena”, or nature though the prism of the human mind. In other words, the human mind is VERY active in shaping our reality.
No one likes this.
And they don’t like it because they know it’s true.
To perceive objects and nature without the human mind would mean to transcend the human mind. OR, ceasing to become human altogether.
As it currently stands, that’s impossible and we run into many metaphysical holes when we try to speculate on that.
Now, that isn’t to say we are “cut off” from external reality. But we are hobbled by our own physical brains. The universe is seemingly infinite, but our brains are finite.
We are like a small hole in the bottom of a beach, where only one grain of sand can pass through at any one moment.
Lame example, I know. But that’s how it feels.
But my larger point is how the Internet affects all of this. Is our logical faculties, rooted in a material brain, designed to handle this shock load?
In our evolutionary development, we developed our facilities to handle immediate needs. Tools and complex communication emerged from this, leading to advanced society and advanced technologies that have seemingly advanced passed our understanding.
I often like to think that art is an unintended byproduct of this development. Literature, drama, paintings, etc. got spat out and reabsorbed back into the machinery. It became an integral part of our language.
Along came the internet and telecommunications where we are bombarded by intellectual work. Now we can’t help but see the archetypal dramatic progression written in the fabric of the universe.
In other words, the internet permits us to live in our own fantasy world….a fantasy that objectively doesn’t exist….it’s a prism on top of a prism.
Are we made to sit behind a computer?
And is it worth tearing the world down because of Jon Gruden’s emails?
The Internet Ruined Everything 