{"id":1373,"date":"2007-06-11T23:36:54","date_gmt":"2007-06-12T05:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=1373"},"modified":"2007-06-11T23:55:24","modified_gmt":"2007-06-12T05:55:24","slug":"exercise-great-caution-when-peeling-back-the-skin-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/2007\/06\/11\/exercise-great-caution-when-peeling-back-the-skin-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Exercise great caution when peeling back the skin of life."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As human animals, we are condemned to live with great ignorance in an unpredictably violent world.\u00a0 To compensate, most of us work hard to develop an extraordinary expertise to protect ourselves from considering our precarious existence.\u00a0 We work hard to pre-screen toxic thoughts.\u00a0 We rarely contemplate our own inevitable deaths, for example.\u00a0 We are often successful at protecting ourselves from <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=181\">real-life things that would terrify us if we dared to squarely consider them. <\/a><\/p>\n<p>Once in a while, though, we get a terrifying glimpse of unvarnished reality.\u00a0 For instance, we sometimes suddenly realize that we are affixed to that Conveyor Belt of Life, a \u201cbelt\u201d that inexorably moves us toward a time when we will be old if we&#8217;re lucky, then lifeless.\u00a0 Whenever this terrible thought brings shivers, we quickly change channels to consider something less macabre.\u00a0 Yet we are all strapped onto that Conveyor Belt, even our precious young children.\u00a0 In 150 years, everyone currently living on Earth will be dead.\u00a0 It is difficult to conjure up more disturbing thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>What other toxic thoughts occur when our mental guard is down?\u00a0 How about the thought that <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=1287\">we are not meaningfully different from each other<\/a>.\u00a0 Or that the world is full of mobile intestinal tracts&#8211;walking talking intestinal tracts.\u00a0 Or that <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=1286\">our bodies are rife with parasites.<\/a> And that <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=231\">we are animals.<\/a> Or that we are breathing, thinking meat, a point directly yet elegantly made by a touring entourage of corpses known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bodyworlds.com\/en.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">BodyWorlds.<\/a>\u00a0 And here\u2019s another toxic truth most of us dare not consider: that our social order is incredibly fragile, and that it is all too capable of suddenly turning to <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=699\">ignorance and violence<\/a> (and see <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=908\">here<\/a>)\u00a0 Here\u2019s another toxic truth: we know very little about ourselves and our world.\u00a0 As Nietzsche said,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Just beyond experience!\u2013 Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience &#8211; just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nietzsche (Daybreak, s. 564)<\/p>\n<p>Because we so often practice shielding ourselves from such toxic thoughts, we become experts at concealing overwhelmingly obvious aspects of even our own bodies from ourselves.\u00a0 Nietzsche had a lot to say about this self-ignorance:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body, in order to confine and lock him within a proud deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers!\u00a0 She threw away the key.\u00a0 And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>[The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, edited by Magnus and Higgins, page 30 (1996).]<\/p>\n<p>About ten years ago, I wrote a paper analyzing numerous social phenomena from the viewpoint of limited human attentional capacities.\u00a0 It was an over-ambitious paper, but working on it triggered an epiphany for me: I realized that much high-level human behavior stemmed from low level routines and habits and that many high-level decisions resulted from limited attention (that is highly susceptible to manipulation) and fatigue.\u00a0 In other words, I realized the much human behavior could be explained in terms of attention.\u00a0 Here is that paper:\u00a0 <a onmousedown=\"selectLink(1372);\" id=\"p1372\" href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/heuristics_as_perceptual_strategy.doc\">heuristics_as_perceptual_strategy.doc<\/a><\/p>\n<p>My friend Dea read this paper and reacted with horror.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t want to consider that humans could be \u201creduced\u201d to anything predictable or analyzable.\u00a0 She craved autonomy and freedom and she wanted to believe in old-fashioned versions of love, honor and courage.\u00a0 For her, one of the most toxic thoughts possible was that complex human behavior could someday be explained in terms of hormones or bouncing atoms.\u00a0 <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I cling to the belief that we can still have all of the romantic and moral notions we love (and hate) about humanity, in addition to the things that science can tell us about ourselves. Dea strongly believed otherwise.\u00a0 She was uncomfortable with the terrifying glimpses that science offered to her.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t want to consider that humans were limited in their freedom.\u00a0 Most of all, she didn\u2019t want to consider humans to be machines of any sort.<\/p>\n<p>Reality can be terrifying and even dangerous, especially when we let our guard down.\u00a0 Most freethinkers I know have some dark moments when everything about life seems to be just a bunch of \u201cstuff\u201d and where life seems to lack any coherent meaning.\u00a0\u00a0 As we\u2019ve often discussed at this website, those moments drive many people into the waiting arms of religious institutions, though not freethinkers.\u00a0 On the other hand, freethinkers have our own sets of comforting myths. We believe in things like freedom, justice and \u201cthe meaning of life.\u201d All of us fortify our sanity with comforting myths.<\/p>\n<p>But what happens when we get overloaded with raw reality, when life terrifies us to the point that our comforting myths are shredded?\u00a0\u00a0 What do we do when we reach the point where we wonder whether we are even capable of making any sense of a world that appears to be spinning out of control?<\/p>\n<p>I occasionally experience moments like this.\u00a0 During some of these moments, I\u2019ve recalled an extraordinary article from salon.com: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/dir.salon.com\/story\/mwt\/feature\/2004\/11\/30\/iris_chang\/index.html?pn=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">How &#8220;Iris Chang&#8221; became a verb.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=1104\">I\u2019ve written about Iris Chang before<\/a>.\u00a0 She was a terrific writer who <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Iris_Chang\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">committed suicide<\/a> on November 9, 2004, after a depressive episode resulting from a nervous breakdown.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What had Iris Chang seen?\u00a0 She had deeply researched and written several books involving terrifying subjects.\u00a0 One of those books was <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Rape_of_Nanking_%28book%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Rape of Nanking<\/em><\/a>, a book I am in the process of reading.\u00a0\u00a0 Another one of her books, The Chinese in America (2003), concerns the often abysmal treatment of Chinese people in America.\u00a0 In the Salon.com article, Paula Kamen writes that the extensive research Iris did peeled back the candied veneer of life and became dangerous:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>She had made a major historical discovery: a hidden Nazi diary chronicling the massacres by the Japanese in China in new detail. In China, the WWII atrocities have long been a national nightmare, and they have received attention from historians and academics over the years. But it took Chang&#8217;s energy, will and engaging writing style to make the massacre come alive to a popular audience in the West. From reading her letters, I knew how hard she had worked on that book. She traveled through China on her own and challenged the U.S. government for long-classified documents. She was genuinely shocked at the atrocities she had exposed, and reacted with a pure, honest rage &#8212; like someone seeing evil for the very first time. She couldn&#8217;t understand the possibility of knowing about such things and not writing about them. Part of the power of her interviewing was that she had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her; I suspect she didn&#8217;t even know that people came with filters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>According to Kamen, it appears that the work Iris Chang did was too much for her to bear:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Over the next hour, I stumbled to ask her about what had happened. She talked about her overwhelming fears and anxieties, including being unable to face the magnitude &#8212; and the controversial nature &#8212; of the stories that she had uncovered. Her current vaguely described problems were &#8220;external,&#8221; she kept repeating, a result of her controversial research. They weren&#8217;t a result of the &#8220;internal,&#8221; that is, they weren&#8217;t all in her head. I asked her about what others in her life thought about the cause of this apparent depression. She paused and said, &#8220;They think it&#8217;s internal.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nietzsche often wrote on the nature of truth.\u00a0 For Nietzsche, truth was a matter of how much reality we can stand.\u00a0 He spoke of the danger and reward of questioning.\u00a0 For him, philosophizing was a demanding and dangerous endeavor that many people simply cannot endure.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Usually, our comforting myths keep away the demons.\u00a0 We posit deep meaning in trite things.\u00a0 Everything is OK as long as our baseball team wins the division.\u00a0 Or we are on top of the world as long as we own a sports car.\u00a0 We are invulnerable as long as others compliment us.\u00a0 We are gods as long as we get affection and attention from an attractive significant other.\u00a0 Life is wrapped around our finger as long as we up with a lot of money.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of these comforting myths serve a lifetime, at least for those who don\u2019t think too much.<\/p>\n<p>For others, though, raw reality sneaks in too intensely or too often.\u00a0 Despite their best efforts to portray their lives as tidy, happy or meaningful, too much physical or mental pain leaks in.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s because their bodies are breaking down.\u00a0 Or maybe it\u2019s because they don\u2019t \u201cfit\u201d in their worlds.\u00a0 Often it\u2019s for reasons they can\u2019t articulate.\u00a0 The result is often depression.\u00a0 Sometimes this depression is therapeutic.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Why-We-Get-Sick-Darwinian\/dp\/0679746749\/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1\/105-6055196-8851623?ie=UTF8&#038;s=books&#038;qid=1181283641&#038;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Why We Get Sick<\/em><\/a> (1994), Randolph Nesse and George Williams argue that many forms of depression have an adaptive function.\u00a0 Even though depression may seem &#8220;completely useless,&#8221; it seems to serve a function.\u00a0 Nesse and Williams suggest that someone could someday test this theory by finding a safe drug that completely prevents normal sadness in large populations.\u00a0 They suspect that preventing sadness\/depression completely would result in massive social dysfunction.<\/p>\n<p>They write that sadness &#8220;somehow changes our behavior so as to stop current losses or prevent future ones.&#8221;\u00a0 Sadness causes us to slow down or stop what we are doing and to &#8220;take off the rose colored glasses in order to reassess our goals and strategies more objectively.&#8221;\u00a0 Depression slows us down, thereby protecting us from making major life changes impulsively.\u00a0 This description reminds me of the paralysis that happens during sleep so that we don\u2019t cause injury by physically acting out our dreams.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As mentioned above, many people look to bureaucratic religions for quick and ready-made sets of rose-colored glasses.\u00a0\u00a0 For many people, these canned prayers and rituals successfully fend off sadness and depression. Reaching for these canned sets of religious beliefs seems odd to me, given the flimsy-seeming myths and the grotesque implied threats embedded in the <a href=\"http:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/?p=240\">\u201cloving\u201d doctrines<\/a> offered by bureaucratic religions.<\/p>\n<p>Followers of organized religion spent much time clinging to these bureacratic quick fixes.\u00a0 They clamor for existential medicine capable of fending off the sorts of tragedies to which Iris Chang succumbed.\u00a0\u00a0 I am suspicious, though.\u00a0 I suspect that organized religions only addresses symptoms rather than the underlying conditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It seems to me that each of us needs to get down to work to construct our own meaning of life.\u00a0 To do the job right takes courage, endurance, persistence, pain, and the willingness keep an open mind.\u00a0 It also takes some periods of sadness, sometimes extended sadness.\u00a0 I thus agree with Nesse and Williams that some types of depression are palliative.\u00a0 It is sometimes necessary to see unvarnished life in order to chart a new and meaningful course.<\/p>\n<p>To avoid sadness by taking on anyone else\u2019s canned \u201cmeaning\u201d (including any sort of institutionalized mythology) is like trying to wear someone else\u2019s clothes.\u00a0 Misfits are too likely.\u00a0\u00a0 This is obvious to me when listening to most people explain their institutionalized religious beliefs.\u00a0 It is clear that most people do not affirmatively believe in their bureaucratic religious beliefs.\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 Instead, they allow organized religions to dictate one-size-fits-all meaning.\u00a0 Although the pushers of bureaucratic religion would argue that religion like a reputable prescription drug, I am suspicious that it is too often too much like a street drug, good only for short-term happiness at the expense of long-term pain, disruption and ignorance.<\/p>\n<p>What is the alternative to drinking the special Kool-Aid that bureaucratic religions offer?\u00a0 It\u2019s doing the hard work to determine the meaning of one\u2019s own life.\u00a0\u00a0 As Nietzsche often wrote, doing this sometimes terrifying work is exhilarating:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We philosophers and \u2018free spirits\u2019 feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation \u2013 finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again,; maybe there has never been such an \u2018open sea.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>[Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 343]<\/p>\n<p>This idea of Nietzsche took deep root in me when I first read Nietzsche at the age of 20.\u00a0 The only way to contemplate and live ones life genuinely is to do one&#8217;s own philosophical work.\u00a0 To refuse to work on one&#8217;s own meaning of life is to buy into the biggest fallacy of most organized religions:\u00a0 that there is a capital \u201cM\u201d Meaning of Life, a single principle for describing the meaning of every person\u2019s life.\u00a0 This fallacy suggests that strangers (i.e., strangers who are paid to work as clergy) know you well enough to speak for you.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The need to think through one&#8217;s own meaning of life is strewn with ironies.\u00a0 For instance, part of what makes life unwieldy, disruptive or even insane for many freethinkers is that we must deal with the ghoulish, garish, awkward, mass-produced protective coatings dispensed by so many organized religions to so many millions of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Another irony is that many people might not be able to survive life without the mass-produced \u201cmeaning\u201d handed out by organized religions.\u00a0 These crude mass-produced mythologies \u201cwork\u201d in the sense that they keep some people alive and sane.\u00a0 Consequently, it might be cruel to deprive them of the protection these mass-produced rituals and fables.<\/p>\n<p>The biggest irony is this:\u00a0 Those of us who don\u2019t buy into institutional mythologies must occasionally descend to painful and dangerous mental places in order to construct durable meaning for our lives.\u00a0 It appears that many of us occasionally need to expose ourselves to unvarnished life (at least occasionally) in order to immunize ourselves to it.\u00a0\u00a0 For free-thinkers, then, a life that is contemplative and life-affirming can also be dangerous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As human animals, we are condemned to live with great ignorance in an unpredictably violent world.\u00a0 To compensate, most of us work hard to develop an extraordinary expertise to protect ourselves from considering our precarious existence.\u00a0 We work hard to pre-screen toxic thoughts.\u00a0 We rarely contemplate our own inevitable deaths, for example.\u00a0 We are often [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,7,34,8,23,14,3],"tags":[6457,500,502,6437,6464,499,253,487,6438,503,504,501,6453,6444,6431],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-good-and-evil","category-health","category-meaning-of-life","category-psychology-cognition","category-reading-books-and-magazines","category-religion","tag-culture","tag-depression","tag-facade","tag-good-and-evil","tag-health","tag-insanity","tag-iris-chang","tag-life","tag-meaning-of-life","tag-myth","tag-mythology","tag-nesse","tag-psychology-cognition","tag-reading-books-and-magazines","tag-religion","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dangerousintersection.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}