Science Fiction As An Allegory For This Era In Humanity

I have a love of science fiction. I find science fiction to be a great source of social commentary and its observations on the problems which lie within our society are second to none. To quote Alan Moore speaking about V for Vendetta, "With most of the future worlds in science fiction you're not talking about the future, you're talking about the present. You are using the future as a way of giving a bit of room to move. A bit of a fantasy element. It makes it into something that is once removed from the thing that you're actually talking about so people can enjoy it on a fantasy level while, hopefully, some of the deeper points that you're making are sinking in."

I think of Star Trek in exactly this way. I've been working my way steadily through the Deep Space 9 series and I can't remember the last time I've enjoyed such a thorough study of moral dilemmas that cover such a vast scope of possible outcomes. The show always gets me thinking, every episode is food for thought. For example, today I was watching an episode where one of the characters said, "It is a soldier's duty to fight during war time" in response to one of the other characters who was glad they'd been assigned a relatively safe mission. I found myself agreeing with him. If you know me at all, you'll know that I usually disagree with this sentiment entirely but the circumstances in this show are different.

From "Starship Troopers"

In our society's current conception, when we fight wars, we fight among members of our own species. Poorer human beings take up arms against their fellow man, usually under the direction of a few, rich and powerful people who disagree. I think Mark Twain said it best, "Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man with his mouth.” In Star Trek it's really quite different. On earth there have been less than 5 cases or murder in 400 years. There are no rich or poor people, when war is fought in Star Trek, it is fought under the pretense of an egalitarian society whose hierarchy is generally defined by the proven virtues of the people within it. Mankind has truly unified and would laugh at you if you tried to suggest that they choose sides against each other.

To be sure, this is because there are many different races of sentient, humanoid, life forms that take sides against us. I've phrased the last sentence in a certain way to make a point. The show makes the case that in our future human beings no longer seek out battles with any one, rather our curious nature has us exploring the universe to learn and understand everything that lies within it. We don't, any longer, take sides against other types of people, other humanoids, but from time to time, though we mean no living creature any harm, they take sides against us. We are enlightened beings in this sense. In this show, when we engage in war, it is always in defense of the sacredness of all life and in preservation of our ideals against forces which seek to destroy both. And so, when Commander Worf says it is a soldier's duty to fight during war time, under these circumstances, how could I not agree? Not to defend ourselves against an enemy force which seeks to reign over our curiosity and creativity, to bend our collective wills into blind submission of their own, would be a far greater evil than to be completely passive toward a collective of beings which have been genetically engineered to have no appreciation of life, and which can never have this idea communicated to them. This enemy in Star Trek is a purely destructive force. Such a war against such an enemy is a just war, alas I have never witnessed such a thing. I've read about one or two debatably just wars in history books, but no war in my life time has ever been a just war against an ignorant and purely destructive force that is incapable of being reasoned with. In my life time war has always simply been men and women killing men and women over squabbles that seem rather petty in comparison to the value of each and every human life. We raise our guns and arm our bombs to destroy one another where we should be raising our voices and opening our arms to embrace one another in the spirit of friendship.

We could learn a lot from science fiction, a lot more than we do. Instead of taking as much stock in the philosophies present in every science fiction novel, episode, and film, we denounce their admirers as nerds, and dweebs, and geeks. We mock people who spend their time hypothesizing about better cultures than our own rather than heralding them as champions of thought, and we do so at our own expense. We like to think of ourselves today as modern people, but we really haven't advanced that much. Our technology has evolved, but the way we think about one another is still very much the same, our general culture of some people being worth less than others is still very much intact. If you were to take any person who lived in the time of Jesus Christ and raise them from infancy here today, you'd find they would be no different than you or I, and the same is true in reverse, and thus in this respect we have not evolved even an ounce. We are still the same people today we were 2,000 years ago, the only difference is that we've got better stuff. And even then, we have the same appreciation of it now that we did all those years ago. We have an abundance of food, water, shelter, healthcare, and education and yet we still continue to treat it as if we don't know if next year's crop will be good enough to support the local populace, much less the world’s. What we have in abundance we treat as if it were scarce and we treat people as if it needs to be rationed out somehow and we do this by making them work under the threat of doing without these things. We gain people’s cooperation within all of our societies by holding their quality of life at ransom.

The United States alone generates more food in a year than there is money or demand to buy it all. And what do we do? We hoard our food supply, we stockpile it, anything but give it to someone somewhere else who is starving for no other reason than that they can't pay for it. This is incredibly ironic when you consider that the average American household wastes 40% of their food supply. Economics is an idea. Capitalism is an idea. Meritocracy, which is the idea that people should get what they deserve or have earned, is only an idea. People, men, women, and children, live in filth, live in constant hunger, live without proper medical treatment, live without realizing their potentials through education, all because of our ideas, their sum total being that for one reason or another, "it's not our problem" or "they deserve it". Amazing how in 2,000 years we still haven't learned how to properly view our fellow man. Many of us think of people as expendable things, as entities separate from ourselves, a few of which are greater than ourselves, and most of which are lesser than ourselves. We are human beings, and not a one of us is worth something different from another, not less and not more, because this value exists independent of a person’s contribution, wellness, rank in a military or in an academic institution or anything else for that matter. Man is something whose value exists as a means unto itself, not as a means to an end of some kind or another, which is what living with Capitalism has most of us believing. We are not Americans, nor are we Russians. We are not Christians, nor are we Muslims. We are not combatants, nor are we merely allies. We are Humans, that is our species, and we exist under this mantle as a collective which in its full sum is a singular, undivided entity. It is easy to forget this sometimes, or even never really learn this lesson at all, because of how caught up we've all gotten in the different ideas we've come to value and defend so ardently. Please, don’t misunderstand me, it is a good thing to have and to love ideas, it is even a good thing to defend one's ideas, but not at the sum expense of another person's existence or quality of life. The idea of this species trumps the value of all other ideas. Why? Because if we place any other notion above ourselves, in the end we will destroy ourselves. When push comes to shove, if you make some people choose between other people and an idea you've persuaded them to vest more value in than those other people, they will choose the other idea and then we are lost to nothing more than emotions fueled by opinions, beliefs.... mental constructs of a mind or minds not well suited to respecting the sanctity of life. To quote science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, “Then [we’re] cursed and cursed again. [We] will only wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

I'll say it again; We could learn a lot from science fiction, a lot more than we do. And no matter what the source, we’d better learn soon because this way of life which each of us has found ourselves living in is not sustainable, and not just ecologically speaking. This isn’t a threat, this is our reality, and the only threat that exists is the one we’ve created for ourselves. Our species is its own arbiter and it always has been, and it is for us as a collective whole to pass down our own judgment upon ourselves. This judgment, it is not the government's job, it's not the church's job, it is not your job and it is not my job. It is a job for all of us, together, as one human race. The only question is, will we deliver unto ourselves a death sentence and then proceed to be our own executioner, or will we choose life, a better life, a human flourishing at a level which no person has ever seen before? These are really our only options, because our toys are getting bigger, faster, and far more deadly every day. We have learned how to construct near perfect weapons of mass destruction before we have learned how not to use them. Our cleverness with technology has made us our own worst enemy, to the extent that either we find enlightenment, we evolve our culture, we grow to unify as one people or we will find this planet becoming a mass grave for a bunch of imbeciles in the long run, it’s really that simple.

Being Nice vs Being Kind: How they're different and why it matters

For years I've been really bothered by nice people. I've always had a very low tolerance for them. To put it bluntly, they annoy the shit out of me. For years the reasons for this were always really ineffable to me, but I believe now that I've gotten it properly sorted out. You see, while I have a very low tolerance for nice people I have great respect and admiration for people who I perceive as being very kind, and I believe that there is a real difference between these two things.

Nice people always strike me as either being disingenuous or ignorant. They operate from a place of cowardice, always trying to spare people from harsh truths, that or they're putting on a facade to get what they want from people (manipulation), be it approval or something material. In my book when someone says, "I was just trying to be nice", this is not a good defense of one's actions and you'll notice they always say it when they've been caught satisfying one of the prerequisites for being nice; either cowardice, ignorance, or in trying to gain something from someone. I do not have (m)any nice friends.

What I do have are some very kind friends. Kind people, by contrast, are very brave. To be kind requires, at a minimum, a certain sort of moral intelligence. By this I mean an ability to properly negotiate moral situations. Kind people operate out of compassion for their fellow man, and a kind action is not one that operates solely out of a place of self preservation (cowardice) or self interest (manipulation and approval seeking). Some of my kindest friends have said the things that have been the most difficult for me to swallow. Where people who are being nice prefer to spare my feelings, people who are being kind never hesitate to deliver a harsh truth that is meant to help me.


Kind people don't lie to make you FEEL better, they are honest and frank with you in an attempt to get you to BE better, and are relatable in this way, at least for me that is. I cannot relate to nice people, and this is because I feel like I can't be honest and frank with nice people, and I never have. To put it another way, some of the nicest people I know will never say the word "fuck" and you never feel as though you could ever say it to them, while some of the kindest people I know could be misconstrued with sailors at times. While this shouldn't be a hard and fast rule to tell the difference between nice and kind people, you only notice this trend because it gets to the root of that difference. Nice people act out of an aversion to unpleasantness, even of language, while kind people act out of honesty and compassion without regard to how pleasant or unpleasant something may or may not be.

Some added credence to my opinions on this is an article I found subsequent to drawing this conclusion. It's written by a psychiatrist on The Huffington Post.  In the article Dr. Sirota writes, "kindness emerges from someone who's confident, compassionate and comfortable with themselves. A kind person is loving and giving out of the goodness of their heart. At the root of extreme niceness, however, are feelings of inadequacy and the need to get approval and validation from others. Overly-nice people try to please so that they can feel good about themselves."

In summation, don't go around trying to please everyone and avoiding unpleasantness. It may be nice, but it's certainly not kind and it's definitely not productive. In the end being nice hurts more things than it helps. Nice people can ruin the world, with their self serving apathy and endless appetite for keeping things pleasant and meeting with the approval of others. I never have had the stomach for them, and hopefully I never will. Be kind, even if you have to be cruel to do it, because everyone you know (as well as everyone you don't know) is fighting a hard battle and they could use your help and your compassion, your kindness if you will, a hell of a lot more than they could use a few petty, nice sentiments.

I don't understand why I do it. That I do at an intellectual level doesn't help.

I volunteered to work 20 hours of overtime this week and I don't even know why. On the surface it's for the extra bread, but I don't know what I expect to do with it. I just keep throwing myself into this life style that has never stopped being a stranger to me. I am trapped by money in a mode of living that I find insufferable. I can't quit, at least that's what I tell myself, because where else would I make as much money? I don't want to replace this job with another job. But then, how do I survive? And not just survive, but thrive? It's not that I feel as though I deserve not to have to work, quite the contrary, I simply feel that no one deserves to have to sacrifice a third of their life to anyone (I use the term generously since now, apparently, corporations are "people" too).

I'd like to spend my days in cafes drinking and eating and chatting up beautiful women and philosophizing with other patrons. I don't want to write anything down. I don't need to inspire future generations. I need the means to live like I do when I'm not at work, and the time away to visit other places that no functioning institution would ever provide me with. Perhaps that's what bothers me the most. No matter how much money I make, I will never have the time to do what I want to with it because I always have to come back, if I don't I'll starve to death, homeless, sleeping on a sidewalk. That's a reality here in this first world, freedom loving nation that let's people rot in the name of liberty instead of helping them in the name of humanity.

I have 20 days of vacation time left, but of course they won't just let me take a month off of work. Even though it's my time to do with as I please, I have to chop it up in a way they feel they have the right to approve of, and in a way that is amicable to the wishes of other people in my department, and of course if I try to do otherwise they will try to make a moral argument, that if I take time off when another person does, this burdens the department and so one of us will need to give up our ambitions, and if it isn't me who does it then I'm the bad guy who didn't cater to the whim of someone else I work with. Of course, the whole time no one wants to bring up the elephant in the room, that this entire moral conundrum really has nothing to do with either me or my competing coworker, rather it was created by the company, as is every situation in my work environment.

If they hired more people, vacation time wouldn't be such a nightmare. Of course, they did hire more people, but they haven't started yet. Instead of waiting until these people have started and have been properly trained to implement huge changes in the work flow of my department, the smart thing to do when management is clearly aware of the situation, they have gone ahead and made all of our jobs more tedious and bureaucracy-filled which is why I'm able to work so much over time in the first place. And all of this is negating the fact that when these new people start, it's not going to make a difference. They were hired under the mindset that it would make the work load more bearable and conducive to special projects, instead, now the status quo will be achieved at best and we'll be right back where we started a few months ago with not enough time to work on special projects, and still too stiflingly busy to take vacation time whenever there are other people who also want that time.

None of this makes sense if your goal is to heighten people's quality of life, but it all makes perfect sense if you have a kindergartner's understanding of economics and what motivates people under the assumption that this will provide you with greater profit and savings to the department. Of course, I will never voice these opinions in real life, not to anyone who matters at least. All of the sudden I had the most surreal feeling when I typed, "not to anyone who matters", haha. You know you've been working in a corporation for too long when you start talking about people as if some of them matter or have value... and most of them don't.

"the 12 hour night" by Charles Bukowski

"the 12 hour night" by Charles Bukowski

I found myself in middle age
working a 12 hour night,
night after night,
year after year
and somehow there seemed to be
no way out.

I was drained, empty and so
were my co-workers.
we huddled together
under the whip,
under intolerable conditions,
and many of us were
fearful of being
fired
for there was nothing left
for us.
our bodies were worn,
our spirits whipped.

there was a sense
of unreality.
one becomes so tired one
becomes so dazed,
that there is confusion and
anguish mixed in with the
deadliness.

I think that, too,
kept some of us working there.

12 hour nights.
I can't explain why I
remained.
cowardice, probably.

then one night I stood up
and said,
"I'm finished, I'm leaving
this job now!"

"what? what? what?"
asked my comrades.

"do you know what the
hell you're doing?"

"where will you go?"

"come back!"

"you're crazy! what will
you do?"

I walked down the rows
of them, all those faces.
I walked down the aisle
past rows and rows of
them,
all the faces looking.

"he's crazy!"

then I was in the elevator
riding down.
first floor and out.
I walked into the street,
I walked along the street,
then I turned and looked
at the towering
building, four stories high,
I saw the lights in the
windows,
I felt the presence of
those 3,000 people
in there.

then I turned and walked away
into the night.

and my life was touched by
magic.

and it still
is.

Aphorism #2 - Maturity

It seems to me that many people's thoughts on what is and isn't mature thinking have a lot do with how much they agree with it, whether or not they used to share the same perspective, and how jaded they've come to feel about it subsequently.

Aphorism #1 - Betrayal of Institutions

Betray an institution, no matter how large, and you have only betrayed an idea. Betray people in favor of an institution and you have betrayed your species. Nations and religions are institutions, are ideas. Treason and heresy, it would seem, are in the eye of the beholder.

Support for anything that supports some people and not others is to commit heresy against one's humanity and treason against your species. People occupy the top slot of my hierarchy of values, one need only ask themselves what occupies their own, and if it isn't people they should perhaps re-evaluate what it is they hold so dear.

There's nothing wrong with being wrong, and cultural relativism doesn't help!

I assert that one should have a good deal of respect for their fellow man no matter what, and very little for any of their ideas that aren't supported by evidence. There is a separation between a person, their value/integrity as a person, the ideas and beliefs they hold true, and the value/integrity of the ideas and beliefs they hold true. I actually find that a far greater insult than attacking a person's idea, is to treat a person as if there is no divide between them and their ideas, because how then could a person ever admit they were wrong about anything, right? In that scenario, to lose an idea because it was wrong would be the equivalent of ripping out a part of yourself and then replacing that part with something else, how painful!

Being wrong, I say, is something most people make into a needlessly painful experience full of shame and guilt and misery by means of not separating themselves and the value they have from their ideas, as if a person's value is at all tied into their ideas. It sounds absurd, right? I mean, if this was true, we'd kill all of the neo-nazi's in America because their ideas have 0 value and thus they would have 0 value under that notion. But we don't, and this is because we still acknowledge the fact that these people have a certain inherent value as people. Some of you reading this may be thinking to yourselves, "Duh... okay, when are you going to say something I didn't already know?" Well, you ought to actually give yourself a good deal more credit than you actually are, because there are people out there, even now, even in your city, who are what we call "cultural relativists" that see no difference between people and their ideas and who would attack you like a feral dog if you tried to assert that something someone else believed was wrong at all. They believe themselves to be defending people from mean ol' rationalists like myself, but in fact they're hurting them. What is the end result of all of this relativity and extreme tolerance? See for yourself: http://www.thebestschools.org/bestschoolsblog/2011/12/03/wrong-culture-right-teacher%E2%80%99s-surprising-discovery/

I know, it's horrifying. And yet, haha, AND YET there are people who raise their children like this and who get glorified by their friends as the King or Queen of tolerance. There is a difference between intolerance for people and intolerance for their ideas, and it's about bloody time we made this divide well known and understood so we can really put to rest a lot of the myth's, superstitions, and generally bad or dangerous ideas without all of this "you're not respecting me" mess. Whenever someone says this to me I like to respond with, "Quite the contrary, it's because I respect you that I bother disagreeing with you at all."