Loss and gain

If I go back and look at my earliest posts from 6, 7 years ago, I notice a distinctly angry undertone in them. It is often the anger of a moralist and, by simple extension, the anger of a hypocritical and insecure person (my point being that all moralists are hypocrites). At some point I realized, perhaps not as clearly as I do now, the idiocy of my own views from that time and I tried to compensate for them by trying to see more love and beauty than I frankly could ever have stomached. Freewheeling compassion, love, empathy, happiness, joy, and sense of community are just not my cup of tea and I look at people who evince such emotions with the same skeptical eye that I use to look at used car salesmen. Such emotions are palatable to me only in small and measured doses and only in a very personal and quiet sort of context. So my effort at trying to be more compassionate on this blog turned out to be another kind of failure and I have again seen myself move, of late, towards a more negative tone. I think this time the negative tone is here to stay as it is a deep and honest reaction against some fundamental aspects of the times that we live in.

The answer to the question 'what is valuable' differs from person and person and also on what level it is being asked. On the level of a society the answer may be a utilitarian one: more happiness to most. On the level of an individual the answer will often be more selfish and will also be more flamboyant and diverse. Who can say that the value "more happiness to most" is not a good one? It is very hard to argue against until one sees it as being possible only as a result of a larger struggle, one between liberty and equality, between individuality and homogenization, between humanity and bureaucratization. I value the benefits of society but I wish they didn't come at such a grave cost to the I. And I almost wish that this was an earlier time, one where the tools of homogenization were not as sophisticated as they have become now, one were individuals were not reduced to market entities nearly to the extent that they are now, one where dehumanization wasn't as rampant as it is currently. Of course the prototypical product of the internet age - a person who appears light on depth and deep on superficial thought, a herd follower through and through, a person brought up on a steady dose of facebook likes, reddit upvotes, and instagram whatevers, a person who must not be taken seriously until he/she emerges from behind the shadows and owns up to his/her views and argues on behalf of them - will find it easy, almost instinctive to ridicule my yearning. What have we gained as a society and what have we lost and is it all really worth it? It's a hard question, one which is impossible to answer with any conviction now. But the answer will become clearer in the coming decades. I believe that the dehumanization project will become transparent enough for some of us to wonder as to why we bothered in the first place. And for some of us to then be confident in exclaiming that what's lost is incredibly more valuable than what's gained. We used to worry about bringing up our kids with reasonable economic and social capital, with his/her own proper sense of his/her own place in the world. This will not be an issue in the future, at least not in the same sense as the question itself will disappear. Every human aberration will be explained away through generic labels, mechanical descriptions, cured away through red, blue, and green pills, surveilled and converted into streams of data, stored, stashed away in giant monolithic buildings somewhere in the Nevada desert. All philosophical digressions will be drowned mercilessly by the collective hivemind of the ultraconnected society.

We will, in summary, have gained eternal sleep at the cost of our humanity.