How far can you throw me?

Diogenes of Sinope was quite a colourful character. Perhaps you know of him, he was after all one of the better known Cynics. Plato knew him too, and often took the piss.

Diogenes you see, was more sensitive than most to the absurdity of the human condition. He found Greek society to be nothing more than a contrivance and affectation. It's said that Alexander The Great, himself an admirer of Diogenes, asked why he was rifling through a pile of bones one day. Diogenese said to him "I'm looking for the bones of your father, but I can't distinguish them from his slaves'."

Diogenes advocated simplicity and self-sufficiency. He saw politics, social climbing, cultural norms and religion as nonsense and nothing more than deceptive, self-delusional claptrap. So he eschewed all that he considered false and lived like an animal. He spent his life in abject poverty, begging and sometimes stealing his food.

Neither did he temper his behaviour in public. Seeing no reason to behave differently than he would in private, he'd defecate in front of crowds. He was also known to masturbate furiously in the local market. "If only one could satisfy a hungry belly just by rubbing it" he'd say. I imagine Plato would watch this and shake his head muttering "wanker" under his breath.

If I were Plato, I'd be pretty pissed with him too. Apparently Diogenes had stamped mud all over his carpets one day and spelt out "I trample upon the pride of Plato". Plato, always one for words retorted, "Yes, Diogenes, with pride of another sort."

Which pretty much sums him, and the Cynics 'philosophy' per-se, right up. Because for me, Diogenes was nothing more than a performance artist and therefore just as affected as the society he was ridiculing.

Perhaps, this was the very point he was trying to make - a point that's as valid today as it was two and a half thousand years ago;

Society is indeed nothing more than contrivance and affectation. We are all, each and every one of us, actors and manipulators. We lie as a matter of course and spend most of our time vying for status whilst pretending that we're not.

How else can we manage to live in such a complex society, one with ever shifting alliances, pressures and opportunities unless we're a bit Machiavellian? Honesty is not always the best policy.

Take the other day for example. I was in a meeting with someone quite senior from a 'competitor' organisation. He likes to remind people of his seniority as often as he can. We needed to reach an agreement between our two organisations. So I smiled politely and nodded sagely, tentatively argued some points and gently guided the discussion to a mutually agreeable point.

You see, I'm cleverer than he is and quite frankly, better looking. So I used his male bravado to my advantage. I allowed him to feel in control, and tolerated his puff chested bleating long enough to subtly (I think), shape the proceedings to our advantage.

On the other hand I could have told him that had a small cock as he seemed to spend most of his time compensating for it. However, this would have done neither of us any favours.

So had I been manipulative in the pejorative sense? Or was I simply being charming and persuasive? Either way, did the ends justify the means? I think so.

Now, I have a theory about really manipulative people. You know the type - always out for themselves and engineering stuff to their advantage at the detriment to others. Conniving little bastards really.

You can spot them a mile off, can't you? Maybe not at first, but it's never long before you're either warned off them, or you discover their nature for yourself.

I propose that these people are just crap at manipulation. Why else do they keep getting caught out? They haven't grasped the subtleties of it and think that winning is about the other loosing. Their Machiavellian Intelligence is poor.

Now I for one, think we should celebrate our contrivance and affectation rather than bemoan it. It's the very thing that makes us human and so evolutionarily successful. Manipulation, lying and posturing are the only way that we can get on in life without murdering each other. It's the oil that lubricates our society.

Mind, I may be just being an old cynic. I wouldn't trust me as far as you could throw me...

Caveat emptor

Not be sold to minors. Serious injury may be caused by philosophical ramifications.

Out of principle I'm not buying one. Can't abide that packaging, it's a bloody nightmare getting into it.

Life is a venn diagram?

I guess then, there are three ways to respond to the human paradox (the universe being pointless, yet finding ourselves full of point);

1: Deny it exists, and submit to the Lord - he who gives us absolute meaning, morality and eternal salvation. It's a shame it's an illusion. It really is.

2: Medicate it away. Perhaps our most common response. Drugs, 1-way entertainment and banality give us the balm we need to ease our existential angst. In this, we confuse happiness with an absence of pain.

3: Accept the paradox for what it is, and suffer the consequences. Both good and bad.

Me? I bounce between 2 & 3 by the hour...

M'off to watch some friday night TV.

The Omniculture

I like the concept of the Omniculture (written about by the blogging heavyweight S. T. Karnick over at The Reform Club), where everything that can be produced is, and is then made available for us all to consume.

Conservative commentators inevitably use this concept to argue that it's causing some sort of moral decline in our society.

So, take my teenage obsession - indie music, which has now been popularised and sanitised by MTV2. It's become mainstream. In response to this, the 'true' indie counter-culture became more extreme and rebellious. Until the mainstream re-integrated it and sanitised it some more. And so the cycle repeats itself.

So, "the boundary of strangeness and perversity must always move outward, as today's "sophisticates" attempt to prove themselves more adventurous and authentic than their predecessors".

The net result, our conservative critics would argue, is that that mainstream art and culture has become extreme, ugly and banal. We've become desensitised to violence and ugliness and perceive them now to be beautiful.

Which is the at root of our moral and intellectual decline, apparently.

I can see where they're coming from. The Panoptican of our internet is full of stuff that bemuses, bores and disgusts me. The TV even more so.

Big Brother for example. Each year I bleat on to Miche, like a smug pseudo-intellectual, about how bleak and depressing it is and how it represents the nadir of our culture. Its on in the background while I read and grumble, but like a moth to a bulb I can't resist watching it. Within 15 minutes of giving in to it I'm hooked, gossiping about it the next day at work.

I guess that the Omniculture then, both improves and inhibits our cultural growth, depending on which way you look at it.

However, I'm not sure that S. T. Karnick's Omniculture is anything new. Now, I'm no cultural historian, but I imagine that during the renaissance there were plenty of conservatives baying that these new thinkers and artists were pedaling chaos and ugliness. This is a gut feeling, truthiness even.

The pace of this Omnicultural arms race has of course increased exponentially through technologies like the Print press, Telegraph, Radio, TV and latterly the Internet.

I guess that's what Karnick is getting at. If a celeb squeaks out a fart nowadays someone will be there with their mobile phone ready to post it to youtube.

Everything, both 'high' and 'low' is available now to be consumed. So, we continually need to push at the boundaries of acceptability to be noticed amongst this clamour.

Perhaps a flaw in the Omniculture idea is that in the middle of all this pushing of boundaries, somewhere between anal porn and Rossini, we still have more and more of the Planets Funniest Animals.

Meaningless?

So, the universe is huge, random and arbitrary. Our place in it is completely insignificant if you think about it. The planets will keep orbiting, and the stars will continue to shine irrespective of whether we're here or not. Inevitably we'll die, hopefully we'll be mourned and missed briefly by a few, but ultimately, our legacies will fade into nothing at all.

Christ, Existentialism is bleak. But no matter how hard I try, I keep returning to it as the only valid way to understand our world. Deep thought was wrong when it worked out the 'Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything'. It's not 42. It's 0, zero, nothing, nada.

So why doesn't the human race collectively lie down in the foetal position and gently wink out of existence, unnoticed by the universe spinning on by?

When I think about it, I guess this is what this blog is all about; Answering the impossible questions like - Why do we still struggle for purpose and meaning in a world that, when deconstructed is ultimately arbitrary and pointless?

I'm pretty confident that my thinking is flawed and imperfect but, for what its worth here are some of my thoughts about why this might be the case.

This 'struggle' is an inheritance from our evolutionary history that goes all the way back to the first single cell organisms. Life for these creatures was simple. Stay alive, reproduce. A clear purpose then, and one that is all consuming. Take your eye (if you've evolved one) off the ball for a second and you're eaten or destroyed. The notion of "why" didn't exist, if it did, then the answer would be 'because'.

Four billion years later this is still the case for all life on the planet. Except for us humans.

We transcended these immediate and violent needs when we started to form complex society. In doing so we had some time to sit and use our newly developed languages to explore abstract ideas with one and other. We started to ask "why?" For the whole of our evolutionary history we'd had one, simple "why"; Stay alive, reproduce. Now, the true nature of this bleak universe was revealed to us. Bewildered and terrified by this existential insight we filled this "void of meaning" with Gods. Vengeful Gods probably, who reflected the cruel and random world we'd been used to living in. But at least these gods gave us our purpose.

Over millenia these spiritual ideas were developed and woven into the very fabric of our society. We grew benevolent Gods who reflected the softer life we had made for ourselves. They continued to give us purpose, codes to live by and answers to our fundamental questions.

Socrates buggered it all up for us. What with his critical thinking and all.

The problem we have now is that we've grown beyond the need for Gods. With the advance of the scientific critical thinking (thanks to Socrates), we can find no evidence of God. We cannot reproduce God in randomised control trials.

In a cruel twist of irony however, those of us in the developed world have never been in more need of a God. For the vast majority of us life is no real struggle. Calories come cheap, and we need to burn very few of them to get more. A drive to the supermarket is all that's required. Our established democracies tax us heavily, but they provide all the infrastructure we need to give only a passing thought to drinking freshwater, staying warm, clean and dry and being entertained.

In reality we don't need to try hard for anything at all. Our well developed social security systems will take care of our basic needs for us if we can't be bothered to meet them ourselves.

The last time we had to live without a god we had a purpose; Stay alive, Reproduce. This time however we have no god, and no real purpose.

I'm going to leave it here, on this optimistic point, for tonight. Tomorrow I'll try to build on these ideas a little more, and explain why ultimately they lifts my spirits.

Update: Link to second post mentioned above.