I actually dig traffic cops. It’s the traffic cops’ duty to make sure people don’t take life too seriously. They’re so dedicated to this, that they in fact hand out fees to anybody not calmed down enough: “Sir, you were on your way to (wherever) at 15 mph over the speed limit. You owe money.” If you’re chilled out about life, you’ll have no traffic-cop issues. Everybody else deserves a court date.
No doubt, one can put together and ask quite a lot of questions that can’t be answered with the science that’s now available. Science doesn’t explain everything. Whether science will ever be able to reply to the inquiries that we collectively consider supreme: that’s another wonder entirely. Perhaps love as we appreciate it will be one day completely lined up with fMRI or other brain scan maps; maybe the “origin of life” will be explained in a way that we can consider likely thus satisfactory; maybe the beginning event that we call the ‘Big Bang’ will be defined in terms of a neat and unifying equation or algorithm. Whatever. The point is, candidly again, science as it stands now doesn’t explain everything we can come up with. And in lieu of any actual answer, we often try to obtain some kind of completion by plugging in a supernatural placeholder: “God did it!” You’ve heard or said this in your own life more than a few times. Why is there something instead of nothing? “God did it.” The theory of evolution by natural selection accounts for the diversity of life, but how did life itself get started? “God did it.” And so forth. You know what I’m talking about. What I wonder is, why is the notion of God doing it maintained and distributed with the connotation that it actually explains anything?
Think about this.
You answer questions that science currently cannot with “God did it!” But then in the next breath you go on to describe God Herself as being “beyond human understanding,” or anything akin. Can you really not readily realize this confidence trick? Having installed God in the middle of everything, you arrive at exactly the same place you would’ve without Her help: “I’m not sure,” or, “I don’t know,” or “It’s beyond human understanding.” You’ve simply personified the unknown, and then made friends with it. Nothing has been gained. Further, matter of factly, “God did it” throws away any potential for advancement. In science, “I don’t know,” is the only answer actually available in quite a lot of domains. Still, this sort of uncertainty maintains room for the ending echo, “…yet.” How did DNA coding come to be? “I don’t know…yet.” By what process does the clump of cells that result from a sperm and egg hanging out for a minute come alive and obtain perspective, what we sometimes call a ‘spirit’ or ‘ego’? “I don’t know…yet.” And so forth. Essentially what’s said in all such cases of science is, “We aren’t sure, but we’re working on it.” In the case of God, however, you offer a heavenly rewording of “I don’t know,” and then stamp the situation, case closed. Why have the physical constants that facilitate our kind of life assumed the values that they have? “God did it. Done. Next question.” This variety of nonsense leaves no room for progress. Not only have you absolutely failed to provide any functional demonstration or explanation of anything; you’ve called your bullshit the final word. On what grounds does this work for you? I sincerely motion that scientifically conceding, “I’m not sure yet,” in the first place is of much more intellectual honesty and use than boasting, “God did it.” Because in either case nothing has been actually moved forward, and in the latter you’ve imagined quite a lot more to be explained, quite a lot that by definition can never be explained, and then told everybody else to stop worrying about it.
What about it?
Woke up in my murderer’s lips
Blindfolded shut by itching bleeding
My self is falling into somebody please,
Will you put it back for me
The time is a December morning’s triple threes, and I barely made it back. Falling layers of glistening dust, this way gust. It’s snowing for real for the first time this year, weather to which one has looked forward only if nine-years-old and the proud owner of a sled. Otherwise, snow is a delaying job commute littered with icy piles and accidents and salt trucks, and probably all three. Snow is a bad ending. Snow is everything is dying. And I think maybe I am, too. Not like the immediate, like I have lymphoma or a blood clot kind of thing, or even like I smoke too many cigarettes. The point is, this can’t be living. This feels like entirely the wrong direction.
Against the steel cold rails of a balcony, it’s higher up here than usual. But don’t worry about me, as I glance down.
Down.
Down.
Sounds and every kind of traffic, a view from this height spoils anybody’s delusional illusion of unique purpose. A view from this height is a reflecting and neverending commonality you want to avoid. From up here, there aren’t faces. From up here, there aren’t even people. Each person isn’t one, only their contribution to whatever this bigger whole, a component of some kind of system. Hundreds of feet down is where I’m looking, some intricately woven ant farm of super highways and too many lights, actually clotted veins of a confused complexity trying to do just one thing: sustain. And even that’s going all wrong. These people if you like to call them that, all of them have a place to be, and it’s really completely the same place to be. Whatever contributing function they chose to be forced into: mother, doctor, student; their role essentially is that they are oriented and mobile, capable and eager serve. They and we really are all one. Not in a good way anymore.
December is it’s cold outside. I’m not up here as much.
Hundreds or thousands of years from now, when humanity has collecitvely committed suicide and the entirety of remaining intelligence on Earth is only of robotic populations, I wonder. I wonder what sorts and parts of robotic culture will realize the humans that were. Us. Artifacts of the programmers and architects and engineers aligned with moving along robotic development. Maybe notes and scientific research journals of the punctuated technological breakthroughs that gradually and carefully developed the robots and enabled them to selfsustain. Media files of us, archaic outdated software; I’m not sure. Maybe the robots will have stories about us. Myths. Digital scriptures of our angers and depressions, and everything different than they can feel. I wonder if they’ll wonder about our kind of lifeforce: our souls, our spirits, egos, perspectives; whatever what’s inside us should be called; it’s not a circuitboard or a hard drive. I wonder if they’ll ponder, the robots, on our hearts and brains that were organic and nonmetallic, nerves not wires. How collectively we can be barely understood. Entirely different and in each of them we’re residue. The collective intelligence to which they owe something between none and all. I wonder if the robots will build the humans that were into God. Maybe we will become legend.
Quite a lot of arguments for the existence of God get their start along the lines of, “Where do you think all of this came from?” (“This” obviously representing the sun, planets and moons of our system; the vegetation and organisms of Earth; oceans and mountains; etc.) Indeed we have available coherent (and godless) explanations for where quite a lot of “this” comes from, but at any rate, here’s what I need help with: How and why is a super-powerful and creative presence capable of making our universe more likely to exist independently than our universe? The world and goings on as we interpret them absolutely are complicated and orderly, but why, do you think, that a God qualified to initiate this situation is any more likely than just the situation, by itself?
Further, if you do in fact maintain that our world is so complex as to necessitate a designer, does it not follow that such a designer would by definition be even more complex, and thus require another, still better designer of Her own? Really. If complexity is a criterion by which you decide whether something has a designer, why haven’t you decided that God, too, should have one? On what grounds is it sensible to dismiss this requisite in talks of God? Because, nonbelief in God allows for the notion, not that something can come out of nothing, but that the complex comes from the simple (the theory of evolution by natural selection being a fantastic example of this premise). In the case for belief, though, what’s endorsed is that something complex comes from something even more complex, that for some unavailable reason is capable of selfsustaining its complexity. In this way, the creationist worldview is internally inconsistent to the point of self-destruction.
“Can I ask you a question, doctor?
“Do you hear all of what I say through the earpiece of a physician, a psychologist? What I talk to you about here: do you receive it always as being the words of a disease that needs to be treated, or do you sometimes empathize, and hear me just as another person? What am I to you?”
In the first place I’m gonna tell you about Mike. Everybody loves Mike.
After three years at a university, Mike decided three years at a university is enough, and stopped going. That was five years ago, and he was an economics major with a minor in philosophy. I cannot say for sure what Mike’s study habits were like, how his grades were, or anything along those lines, but can absolutely say that at economics and philosophy both, Mike is completely brilliant.
Mike used to use his economics in ways that you’d expect. The kind of stuff you see on CNN or MSNBC, about the housing market and stocks. Whatever. I’d often come home and Mike would be arguing at whoever was on TV. “The strength of our dollar should be defined by it’s purchasing power, not how it compares to other failing currencies,” I think I heard him say once. I don’t know.
I live with Mike.
Mike has black and thick hair, broad shoulders, and blue eyes that are the same color blue as the cleaning stuff that comes in spray bottles. Sometimes the spray bottle says window cleaner on it, sometimes it’s for your car’s interior, or it can be all-purpose bathroom. But it’s always that same color blue. So no matter what you’re cleaning, Mike’s blue eyes are making sure you don’t miss a spot. Mike’s perfect, everybody that’s met him thinks. Except for his beard. Mike has a beard like a 17-year-old that hasn’t finished puberty, the yard that somebody fucked up on while spreading grass seed: patchy and weak and, “maybe it’ll be thicker next year.” Except Mike is running out of “next years” faster than most people.
Mike was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia two years ago.
Lymphocytic leukemia means that Mike’s white blood cells can’t fight infections, and get in the way of the healthy blood cells that can. Sometimes he feels really tired all of a sudden. Mike told me that lymphocytic leukemia is very similar to lymphoma, except he probably won’t grow a tumor. Mike hasn’t told anybody else about his leukemia…and that he probably won’t grow a tumor. “In the case of any life-shortening illness,” said Mike, “the tendency is to try for a new perspective, to try from then on to ‘live life to the fullest’ or whatever. What’s funny is that everybody else’s distracting and nonstop pity and sympathy completely prevents you from doing that. You get cancer and consider new things like, ‘Maybe I’ll call my grandma more,’ except every time you call grandma, you’re reminded of your cancer when she asks about it and how you’re doing.
“Living life to the fullest means keeping your problems to yourself.”
Mike still talks about economics all the time, but not like before. Like, there’s a stack of envelopes next to the mattress that he sleeps on: bills, account cancelings, default notices, follow-up default notices, the unmarked white envelopes that arrive when you ignore the follow-up default notices. I asked Mike before if he’s ever going to respond to any of those, or even open the envelopes. “No.” Why not? “Because I don’t have any way to pay off any of that stuff.” Isn’t this a problem? “Maybe. And when you have a problem, there are two ways to get rid of it: undergo the processes and steps required to actually solve it, or just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Ignoring all that shit is much simpler than actually doing something about it. It’s basic economics, man.”
Mike has his half of the rent every month. I don’t much care to know where that money comes from. Even if Mike didn’t have his half of the rent every month, I probably wouldn’t ask him to leave, because then there would be nobody.
To demonstrate blame, and show that the Federal Reserve should be held accountable for the current economic catastrophe that has resulted out of the easy credit and money it’s been providing, Peter Schiff (President, Euro Pacific Capital Inc.) uses the analogy, “If a kindergarten teacher passes out a bunch of soda pop and pixie sticks, and then leaves the classroom, who’s to blame for the mess that happens?”
Some huge truth exists at the face value of Mr. Schiff’s words as-is, but I think this goes deeper, and I’ll take a step back to do you one further: Why are kindergarteners running companies to begin with? Any immediate interpretation of Mr. Schiff’s analogy likely leaves this question unanswered, thus allowing the rebuttal, “The problem is that the people who run companies are acting like kindergarteners!” I have heard this argument and equivalents of it (not only in the context of a response to Mr. Schiff’s point; certainly the thought, “Greedy managers are to blame!!” exists regardless), and yes, it’s certainly true that owners, CEO’s and board members sometimes can — and should be — pointed at with blaming fingers. But I do believe that quite a lot of that blame also belongs with — sing it with me — the Federal Reserve. That is to say, not only is the Fed responsible for distributing candy and soda (or in their case, unsound money and easy credit); it is also very responsible for spreading the reprehensibly infantile mindset that abuses these treats and makes a mess.
Read on.
In literal instances of kindergarteners and candy, the tendency would be to blame the teacher for providing the means (pixie sticks and soda) for the students to make a mess, certainly. However, it wouldn’t necessarily follow, or even likely follow, that the teacher would also be blamed for the mindset of the young students, whatever inspired them to make a mess with the provided treats. One might attribute this to the kids’ parents not bringing them up properly, or more likely, the fact that the kids are young and naïve and “didn’t know any better.” Whatever. The point is, this blame would probably and justifiably be associated away from the teacher. Furthermore, any decent teacher would explain to their students, upon returning to such a mess, “What you did is wrong…I now realize I shouldn’t have left you alone with candy and soda pop…we both learned something today…let’s not let this happen again.” With the Fed, however, the opposite is the case: a destructive mindset is actively promoted, any retrospect after the fact is minimized and justified, and the exact same efforts and strategies are applied again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Chairman Ben Bernanke, for example, justifying printing trillions of dollars and buying up toxic assets, and then telling everybody, “Be confident; our efforts will restore market stability,” as though money that is printed at whim is finally capable of anything other than self-destruction (hint: it isn’t). Only more mess can result, and Ben Bernanke is preaching the contrary and fully aware of what he’s doing. This is a state of mind, and vocalization of it, that is morally akin to that of the school teacher who not only passes out candy to all of the kids in class, but also sticks around to instigate the sugary mess. A kindergarten teacher, standing in front of the chalkboard and shouting, “Throw it around! Smear it all over your faces!! This will all work out!” and then excuses or ignores the ramifications (e.g. the fucking mess) of providing the treats and accompanying bad advice, and does it all over again. …And again, and again.
We are now observing manifestations of such thinking that are messier than ever: a still weakening dollar, falling stocks, depleting bank accounts, closing companies and lost jobs…and the Fed’s cries and cheers are louder than ever: “We are going to print more money! TARP! Bailouts and stimulus packages! Shake your soda even harder before opening it, kids!” as though a reckless monetary policy isn’t a huge part of why this mess exists in the first place (hint: it is), as though the best way to repair a failed system is to reinforce the fundamentally unsound principles it is founded on (hint: …well, you already know).
Any sane person would warrant such a teacher unfit for their duty, being in charge of a kindergarten class, yet this sort of nonsense and damaging thinking is allowed to go on at a central bank, where entire nation’s economies are dictated and decided, not just one group of kids’ manners, not just whether one group of kids gets cavities.
This won’t do at all.
Just as this kind of destructive mentality is unfit to teach kindergarten, it is unfit to regulate an economy. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that there exists no place at all for this kind of abuse, and extreme and repetitive incompetence.
It’s time to grow up and wake up, and this Federal Reserve bullshit.
CLICK HERE to support HR 1207: Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve
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