Is this my biggest obstacle in getting across? As long as people are comfortable, they will fall back on the simple formula of "living for the moment." From that perspective, all this philosophical seriousness and morbid talk of the future must seem odd and bordering on irrelevant.
Of course, in a state of suffering, we see the matter much differently. And when suffering is common in life, living for the moment is, quite often, just living for suffering. Which forces us to abandon the silly notion.
But as things stand, people are comfortable. And once that changes it will change, of course, for a reason, i.e., war, recession, environmental catastrophe. People will then suffer, but they will also no longer have the luxury of preparing for the future. When things are pleasant, we do not think of the future. Once things are unpleasant, we can no longer afford to.
Is human life really so stupid as an Aesop's fable? And how do you go about solving this problem?
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2 comments:
Also, not everyone might agree that the world is necessarily on the brink of becoming a much worse place. In that case, it would be rational to find what you say irrelevant.
I think we often don't estimate the risk of a threat rationally. If the nature of (and our actions against) a perceived threat would agree with our view of the world, we tend to find the gravity of (or at least the need to act against) the threat much worse, and vice versa. Any fear-mongering politician, including you know who, would know.
This is not to say you are fear-mongering, but if we are supposed to spend a lot of energy on trying to survive because we are in danger, we should first be convinced that we indeed are in danger.
It seems to me that unless we really do have to focus on survival, survival is not the most/only important point of life. I echo Sezgi's comment after the entry "survival" (maybe you can open up your response to that a little bit).
Or maybe I misunderstand you slightly, and you put more emphasis on the actual value of survival. But then should we really applaud bacteria?
Sure, survival is not all there is to life. A rock survives, after all.
But, to begin with, there is a real threat. With technology developing as it is, what is to stop a human created virus from killing 50% of us in 50 years? Or, as other technologies advance, won't enriching uranium become far easier? And so won't nuclear explosions become commonplace? In fact, as particle physics advances, is it really so unlikely it will become possible for Joe-on-the-street to blow up the planet? Isn't it inevitable, in fact? It may sound absurd, but this prediction is rooted in the undeniable fact that science and technology have given more and more (destructive) power into more and more hands. If I am missing something, please let me know.
But I don't wish to emphasize survival too much. That's not what this entry is about, really. My main point is that people do not even take their own lives seriously, so long as they are comfortable. And its really a catch-22: once they realize that life is something to take seriously, that they absolutely need a meaning in life beyond pleasure and contentment, it happens to be that they are too busy struggling to survive to put much effort into higher purposes.
I think that scientific research, especially social scientific research, could go a hell of a lot further if it had such a higher purpose. But I think too much of it is done as a kind of leisure activity, and it is also seriously underfunded.
To the extent that research is guided by higher purposes, I think it is usually *misguided*, i.e., by Christianity, or the "scientific pursuit of truth". People don't stop to think about what these sorts of things actually lead to. They are comfortable with the nonsense into which society indoctrinates them.
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