Agenda
By Serge Kreutz Substitute satisfaction is no substitute for satisfaction. All entertainment is just a waste of time.
Sexual intercourse is not entertainment. It’s a deeply philosophical undertaking. During the moment of orgasm we intuitively know more about life than can be learned from hours of meditation or the digestion of philosophical tomes.
Any living human being is just a lump of molecular compounds, a result of the chemical characteristics of the carbon atom. We are victims of nature, tricked into existence by evolution. Consciousness is a faux pas of evolution, as consciousness can only result in the revelation that it would be better never to have been born.
However, the idea of suicide is self-defeating, as the rules of evolution do not only apply to the species but also in the realm of ideas. Any school of thought advocating suicide logically cannot prevail on the face of the earth, as its disciples were to disappear by own choice.
As each of us is just a simmering biochemical soup, we are subject to specific spicing. To avoid boiling over, the spicing obviously has to be done gently. Lifestyle drugs are a good idea, but they have to be applied carefully.
Nevertheless, to get the right taste for life is not only a matter of metaphysics but also of pharmacology. For many men, sildenafil citrate is philosophically more relevant than Spinoza. Death
Apart from good sex, a comfortable death really is the only other legitimate concern in life. All other matters are second-rate topics.
I do not advocate suicide. The neurological wiring of our minds makes it very difficult to reach a decision to commit suicide. This doesn’t mean that we would be glad to be alive. For every ordinary person, the potential for suffering is so much greater than the potential for joy, that in general, it would be better never to have been born.
The conclusion that it would be better not to have been born is not identical with a decision to commit suicide, at least not for as long as we are healthy.
Most people make too few preparations for the most important event in life, which is the cessation of life. This includes the common attitude of not even thinking about death. We should discuss death once we are capable to reason, but not on the basis of those religions that attempt reasoning death away with promises of an eternal life in paradise.
Death is a very individual end of a personality, and there is nothing of what we consider our ego that would survive the moment of a person’s physical death. It is not logically valid to say that, while the eternal life of a person’s soul cannot be scientifically proven, it can also not be proven that there is no such eternal life of a person’s soul. The probability that a nothing will not leave traces is much greater than the probability that a something will not leave traces. Therefore, if there are no traces, it is reasonable to consider a nothing, rather than a something.
While it is irrelevant for the individual what happens when he is dead, the event of dying is of utmost importance to an individual life. Some authors, such as Timothy Leary, have proclaimed dying the ultimate experience in life, an event that brings enlightenment and can be spent in joy (and not just by making a show out of it).
But dying can be sheer horror. And the probability that it will be horror rather than joy is so much greater that, thank you, we opt for a rather neutral setting. Dying in one’s sleep, for example.
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Of all the knowledge we can acquire or possess, knowledge of the purpose of life reigns supreme. Why do we exist, and for what reason do we exist, and therefore, how should we conduct our lives? The extraordinary impact religions have had on mankind for thousands of years has to do with exactly the fact that they have always pretended to have the answers on these questions.
In the monotheist religions that have evolved in the Middle East (mainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the answer is that we walk this planet to conduct lives that please God, so that after death, we will be elevated to another world, named paradise, where everything is better for those who have avoided sins on earth.
In Hinduism, the gods are less serene, and instead of being elevated to paradise, we will just be thrown back on earth after we have died... as a Brahman or a cow, if our karma is good, and if our karma is really bad, we will come back as a worm, and be trampled upon. Therefore, the purpose of life, so they teach, is to take good care of our karma, and to follow according rules.
In the religions of East Asia, they tell us that the purpose of life is to attain enlightenment, which sounds like a lot of respect for knowledge, but on further investigation, it turns out that what they have in mind isn’t science, but rather enlightenment through meditation and total withdrawal from the world.
In modern times, ideologies have sometimes replaced religions in providing answers to the purpose question.
During the European Age of Enlightenment (no relationship to what Asians understand under the term), the idea has been forwarded that a common good is worthwhile to live and die for. This gave rise to patriotism and culminated in the racism of the Nazis who felt that they were what Nietzsche defined as “Uebermensch”.
In Communism, “social progress” was defined as a proper, idealistic purpose for which to live for.
All crap.
Not the priests and imams, and not Himalaya gurus or the philosophers of Enlightenment, and neither the party bosses, nor the politicians advocating democracy and freedom for everyone are the proper authorities to address with questions on the purpose of life, but biologists.
And their answers are just as easy to formulate as are the answers of religions and ideologies: the purpose of our lives is to engage in activities that are associated with propagation. This is not the same as saying: we live to propagate. Because the purpose is in the journey, not in the destination.
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I have not elected to be alive. At best, I have been unintended; the product of an accident. Or worse, I have been planned, not for my benefit, but to add pleasure to the life of my parents.
If I would have had a choice, I would have elected not to be born. I believe that the greatest favor parents can do their children is to abort them in the first few days after they have been conceived. I am of this opinion because it is evident that life, for every living being, brings much more pain and suffering than it does bring pleasure.
If we, as human beings, were fully rational we would hurry to commit suicide as quickly as possible, in an as comfortable a manner as possible. Sleeping tablets or a bullet into the head. Whatever is fast, or at least painless.
Alas, we are not rational beings, but slaves of nature. We are not built with an intrinsic ability to opt out. Rather, our instincts determine that we toil along. Even during terminal suffering, we clinch to life, always hoping for another, a better day.
I have a lot of respect for those who commit suicide for rational, philosophical reasons, and even for those who do it in despair (which is much more common).
Great men have committed suicide on a rational basis when they assumed that life no longer had much in store for them. Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway …
While committing suicide may be the most sensible solution anytime in our lives, the question is for those of us who do not have the courage to proceed (like me): what else to do with one’s life?
I am not into any of the traditional options: I can’t find any solace in any religion, not even Buddhism. I do not live to procreate. Children cannot be the essence of my life.
I also am not dedicated to the good of my fellow humans (no political career for me), and I do not live for the sake of art or literature.
Actually, I don’t believe that there is anything that would truly be worth living for. But those of us who do not have the courage to do what would be right (to commit suicide) find themselves in the quagmire that they have to do something else with their lives. And the best solution for us still is: at least enjoy our sexuality. For when we are carried on the wave of an orgasm, we at least can forget the senselessness of it all.
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Nature is the principle enemy of our individual lives. It’s not that I would prefer asphalt landscapes over trees and flowers. It’s also not that I would view as enemy nature in the form of lions and tigers. The expression of nature that I consider as enemy is not the nature that surrounds us but the nature within.
Nature has genetically programmed us as individuals to leave the scene after some meager one hundred years, while we could just as well be genetically programmed to have individual lives of thousands of years.
Nature has programmed us to physically decline after having reached an early peak in our twenties. Nature has decided for a quick turnover rate for humans (though it’s not quite as short as the turnover rate for rats and cats).
Nature has installed in us an instrument of cognition, which is inadequate because its primary function is not cognition, but to give us a competitive edge in the fight for the survival of the fittest.
As good as I can, I try to overcome the limitations nature has programmed for me. I am not interested in being a tool of nature (that fascist force) for the creation of more optimized specimens of the human species. I can’t see any other purpose in life but to be concerned with my own life. This means, to live as long as possible, and to get as much as possible out of life.
I’m aware of the limitations that still apply to me. One day, individual humans will live thousands of years, or in fact, indefinitely. Having been born a few hundred years too early, I will not be among them.
I’m not even independent enough from nature to elect freely not to live any longer, and to act upon this choice by putting my life to a decent end, right now.
Instead I am but a slave to nature in my instinctive but ridiculous fear of death. I’m toiling along, like billions of other humans, caught in lives in which happiness is but an illusion, and in which only suffering is real. Because this is how nature, our enemy, has designed it to be. But we shall overcome (not me, but later generations).
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Life is senseless, useless. And because there is a high probability that dying will mean agony, it would be better to already be dead. Cognition can go this far.
But even though we know that being dead would be preferable, and even though we can try to avoid dying in a terrible manner, the human dilemma is that most of us cannot just commit suicide. It is so much against what our genes have programmed us for. Decisions to commit suicide usually do not work. Often enough, they are reverted at the last moment.
Humans typically think that they are the best of evolution. But most probably, we are one of the numerous, numerous models that are discarded after some time by self-replicating molecules for being sub-optimal. It’s because self-cognition gets in the way of self-replication.
So what to do?
One option would be drugs, at least theoretically. Drugs, like opiates and other street drug categories, should make us feel happy, and let us forget the senselessness of our existence. The crux is: none of the drugs I tried actually makes me feel good. I prefer being sober (or dead).
The other option is optimal sex. That also feels good. It can even feel fantastic, and like opiates and pipe dreams, optimal sex can let us forget that all is senseless. And we definitely can prepare for a comfortable death.
Most of my writing is about the subordinate aspects of arranging optimal sex. The senselessness of existence is a higher ranking topic, but it is covered in just a limited number of sentences.
Pursuing drugs and pursuing sex are topics on the same level, but drugs, like the senselessness of our existence, as a topic does not warrant all that much detailed attention.
But when I write about pursuing optimal sex, great detail is of relevance: how society provides a cultural frame in which we seek optimal sex, and how it impacts on us; and how we can modulate our organisms so that they will be primed for optimal sexual function and optimal sexual experience.
1997