Philosophizing

I'm afraid there'll be no picures in this post. This is going to be a long, drawn-out ramble with no conclusion by a confused angst-filled writer with numerous unresolved issues.

God, I certainly hope not. There are more than enough of those out there. How did I become one?

Yes, I've had a crisis of 'faith' per se over the last few months, but the faith in question not being one of religious belief, but more so faith in the capitalist system, and our unquestioned buy-in to its underlying assumptions of 'more stuff will make me happy'.

What I've come to notice more and more is the old adage, 'time is money'. Unfortunately, it doesn't work the other way around. Money is not time. The 70 hour work week you just spent doing some 'urgent' task is just so. SPENT! No getting that time back. Was the money worth it? If you work it out, if you're on a monthly salary, by working more, you're actually getting paid less per hour. You've just had a cut-price sale for your time.

There are only a few real truths - one of which is that you exist - 'cogito ergo sum', and another is that you will cease to exist given enough passage of time. If your work gives your life meaning (and there are some people out there for which this is true - and more power to them!), then spending most of your time working should make you happy. If not, then its simply a means to an end. The end being: money in order to live comfortably for the rest of the non-working time (your meaningful time).

I'm beginning to wonder if Socrates was right, in that to truly be happy, one needs to remove oneself from society with a handful of closest friends and live on a self-sufficient plot of land. A hippie commune, without the hippies. I recently met a person who does in fact live this way, at a place called Zendik Farm. They seem like they're relatively happy for now, but sooner or later these sorts of arrangements inevitably break down, don't they? And what about having a pension when they do?

Clearly breaking away from the accepted societal norms is not something which most people could do easily without some form of safety net. I'm beginning to think that the key is fewer people. Fewer people = less competition for resources, less demand for meaningless products, a return to what is important in peoples lives. So how do we cut the world's population?

Nuclear devastation would be a quick fix, but not one I'm particularly fond of (too attached to my own safety to be an anarchist of that nature). Some form of biological weapon could be a bit more selective, but ultimately, the richest people would be the ones who would be able to afford a vaccine or cure, so the world that would emerge afterwards would resemble a feudal system. No thanks. My personal favorite is the 'stealth strategy', which I suspect may already be underway by sheer accident, (or design, who knows) - indiscriminant sterilisation. If 75% of the population couldn't produce offspring, we would start to see a steady decline in the population levels. Of course, the offspring of the other 25% would likely not be affected by the sterilisation agent, and so the population growth would start up again. Meh.

My personal favorite is finding a sterilisation agent that would affect 95%+ of the population, and having a 'neutralising agent' which would allow procreation based on suitability of the applicants, which would mean that their offspring would be affected by the sterilising agent, and be subject to the system. Too Big Brother for your liking, eh? Yes, I do acknowledge this requires faith in the system (and who does these days), and the extreme corruption that a system of this nature would experience. I never said it was perfect. I'm a philosopher after all, not a social engineer. I'll leave that sort of thing to the world's next big mentally unstable dictator, and end up being his/her Nitzche.

So, I've worked my way from a crushing capitalistic system through to a crushing genetic manipulation system. All in the name of happiness.