Get thrown into the sea

I often say things like “remember what they do to geniuses: they get thrown into the sea”.¹ Unfortunately, I have not actually written about any controversial opinions or ground breaking ideas that would get me thrown into the sea. Until now.

In this essay, I’ll list some thoughts that could likely get me thrown into the sea. Do with them what you will.

Rationality is just a tool

Some people seem to devote their lives to behaving rationally or doing what is logical all the time. I find them tedious. I won’t try to explain why: if you know, you know.

Your degree is classist

I believe that the point of higher education is less about education and knowledge than about learning the class symbols necessary to present oneself as belonging to the middle or upper classes. Sociologists have dissected the purpose of education quite a bit. This likely explains why so many individuals enter higher education with optimism and ideals and exit as subdued automatons that think alike and have the same desires.

Your job is meaningless

This isn’t particularly new or surprising to anyone, but I just want to point out: your work is probably pointless and mostly filled with time consuming tasks to prevent you from thinking about the world.

In general, Work (with a capital W) is filled with bureacratic overhead and pointless tasks aimed at providing theater and purpose for the majority of people. If we arranged our lives properly, most people can get away with working a lot less (25 hours per week? 10 hours? who knows) and our population would still retain the same level of comfort.

Clean up after yourself

If we will have forced work, though, I think that the way we distribute work is incorrect: we highly specialize people into classes and allow for people that think they are “too good” for common work. I think a model of work that has civic participation makes more sense: everyone needs to contribute at a base level for X% of the time (1 month?) and the other Y% of the time (11 months?) can be spent working on their niche fields if they so choose.

Enforced under-class

Part of living in nation states is having an under-class of illegal residents that do the work that no one else wants to do. Almost all countries seem to have an under-class from nearby countries - the citizens of one country directly have better lives at the detriment of others. I believe most people’s comfort comes at someone else’s discomfort.

Sacrifice your comfort

I think most people want to be told what to do in order to succeed or be a good person but aren’t willing to sacrifice their own comfort. This is antithetical to improvement: of course the human will take the lazy path and listen to the person that tells them they are great as they are.

Stop making more of you

I believe that pro-creation is creating more suffering and our world is populating too quickly. Even though our land is barely inhabited, we’ve supposedly done a poor job of managing our climate and resources and are on track to do even more damage.

In fact, I’m probably anti-human: I think most humans are ugly and selfish creatures. Some idiot somewhere said our “rational self interest” will be in the benefit of everyone, but it obviously comes at some people’s disadvantage.²

Animal Suffering

Mass industrialization and agriculture has caused problems and most people are causing suffering just by being alive. Even more so for hedonists, gluttons and rich people. Today, each person is likely responsible for hundreds of animal deaths per year and immeasurable suffering.³

I think most people recognize this fact because they will get extremely upset if someone even mentions that they have chosen to not partake in this cycle of suffering.

Notes