Embracing Meaninglessness

The Benefit and Drawbacks of Sciencing

[Cat’s Cradle (1963), p. 42]

“This here’s a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once & it got away somehow, & now they’re got to re-search for it! How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise [sic] elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?”

–Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

HARARI, Homo Deus

“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”

–Yuval Harari, Homo Deus

I’m sure Vonnegut's elevator operator above, and Harari below, have touched upon the hem of the garment of truth. Science is ignorance. Being thus ignorant of higher truths, science must work to achieve wisdom, to use said wisdom to acquire powers and capabilities yet undreamt.

Going down this path – as we have most certainly done – sets us outside the laws of divine justice. We live where WE make the rules: we get to do whatever we want however we want whenever we want to whomever we want.

We may build and drop atomic bombs. We may cloud seed. We may build synthesized molecules, because the ones MN gave us somehow don’t do the trick, not the way we’d like. We may build artificial food, and puff our artificial chests, and hide under artificial masks of make-up and botox. We may change genders and allow ten-year-olds to have cosmetic surgery on their naughty parts [sick]. WE decide what healthy is, and health involves, obviously, very expensive drugs. We must accept, for the first time in history, that someone or something else, other than God or gods, is calling the shots.

But who could that be?

When the concept of 0 (like, zero) first arose, the Church – not Jesus! – argued ferociously that God was in all things, and therefore no-thing (0) could not exist. Which is how Europe remained centuries behind India and the Moslem world, math-wise, well into the Middle Ages, a point Fibonacci first pointed out in Liber Abaci (1202) and its sequel: Liberace’s Revenge (1961). These championed the Hindu-Arabic counting method, a place-value system which included 0.

Fibonacci was the son of a merchant. When the Church forbade the use of 0, merchants continued the tradition.

In gratitude, perhaps, we’ve decided that merchants should now call the shots, as opposed to Odin or Yahweh or the Great Pumpkin. MOTIVE(?): This development was supported by brainiacs’ clever argument that deities’ existence could not be proven, an argument at least unconsciously (probs consciously) championed by all the wrong people.

The ruling class did not need the masses, who cleaned their golden toilets, believing they only needed God and not deluded dimestore Nimrods telling them what to do.

In other words, first came the Agricultural Revolution, then came the Scientific Revolution, then came the Industrial Revolution, and then came the total and complete destruction of the family as the core unit of society.

If the sale and financial security are our end goals, all else is relegated to the sandlot. Remember sandlots? Because I don’t.

Is it really that healthy to be so spiritually, emotionally, and morally bankrupt, to have such weak foundations, and to trust total strangers in lab coats, or suits, to tell us how to get through the day?

Especially if they are championing ignorance from the outset?

No one eats together. Emotional support is found in like-minded strangers online. Spiritual health is pushed to the fringe and considered a luxury by most, while those engaging in it lip sync frozen dogmas, because “that’s the way we've always done it.”

Divorce is the rule, not the exception. Bonds, like atoms’, are made to be broken. Laws are made to be broken. Promises are made to be broken. Resolutions are made to be broken.

Instantaneous gratification is our foundation, not the family, and the rich only get richer.

People are divided, and tribal, which means they are easy to control.

Consult this article for the real costs of being this divided:

https://managementinnovations.wordpress.com/2019/10/18/3-divides-one-needs-to-wake-up/

Among others:

–8.8 billionaires own as much as 3.8 billion people.

–800,000 suicides/year, one every forty seconds.

Because Capitalism has “won," we’ve now achieved the state of permanent revolution Marx (of all people) envisioned, whereby fortune, preferences, popularity, success, security, dependability, charity, knowledge, etc etc etc is based solely on the whims of the crazed market.

Good luck finding your footing there!

Without 0, none of modern society would be possible, and calculus, the study of constant change [developed in the late 17th century as the first European scientists embraced ignorance] would likewise not exist. Google what would happen without 0, and you receive these sobering answers: "Having no zero would unleash utter chaos in the world,” and, “zero is crucial to the function of our world.”

For me, leaning on what I know about the volcanic roots of the self-described great western civilization, it’s hard not to note how similar the shape of this zero is to a crater, and how full of turmoil and eruptions our civilization has become.

It’s hard for me to see how much of our lives is based upon, literally, nothing.

*–Mad scientist pic source: Mad Scientist by thegryph http://ift.tt/1Nk9Yqz http://ift.tt/2I7nP4o