Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
89 www.hplusmagazine.com of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths. If Satan wanted to create the perfect gladiator arena of evil, it would look exactly like the natural world we are in. Schopenhauer says the Secret of Life is: Hell is all that exists, and it requires evil from me if I am to survive. The only way to escape Hell is death. The only way to escape death is to keep killing. And every one of us is doomed to lose. Bwa! Ha! Ha! Ha! This humor column is on a roll now! When our species became self-conscious and future-thinking, the first thing we noticed is that life is too horrible to live. But death is too terrifying to embrace. Yet there is no third alternative. So we make up a bunch of lies to distract ourselves from the horrible reality of existence. Go on. Click on another link. Flick another switch on a screen. Stick an earPod into your skull. Twist yourself into a contortion. Go find a god and pray. Anything to distract yourself from the existential hole at the core of your being that drives your ambitions, the acid of self-consciousness that eats away a gaping cavity of boredom that waits for you in the next moment and will continue in an endless march of moments until you die. Schopenhauer goes further. He says that if empathy really existed, there would be no enjoyment. After all, suffering is everywhere. If we really cared, we'd be perpetually empathizing. But we don't. Why? Because you can't simultaneously be compassionate and content. The existence of enjoyment proves empathy is a fleeting self-indulgence. So why do we keep struggling to increase the suffering of other sentient beings in order to survive? The illusion of hope. If I keep chasing my next desire, maybe I will finally catch the carrot of sustained happiness that will not wither as I grasp it. That's the hedonistic treadmill. The only way to end your participation in an evil universe designed to create suffering is to end your mindless Will to survive. If you were truly a being of pure compassion, you would kill yourself right now. I don't know if this is because I went off my Celexa this week, but it seems to me that Schopenhauer's gift was that he divested himself of the delusions required to survive with a human brain. You want to talk about a guy who stared into the abyss and did not relent until he had used flawless logical steps to march all the way to the bottom. Reading a chapter of Schopenhauer is like listening to a Nirvana album start to finish. Was he crazy? Psychologists have established that healthy people radically over-estimate the amount of control they have over their lives. The only people who accurately assess how much control they have over experimental situations are the clinically depressed. That's right, depressed people are the most uniquely skilled at accurately predicting their control over outcomes. Re-instilling their delusion of control is called curing them. Damn, did those results ever depress me. So here we are, a self-conscious self-lacerating species whose perpetual sense of dissatisfaction drove us to develop genetic engineering, mood-altering drugs, biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and plastic surgery. We can change the whole ball game. We're all Michael Jackson now. The general response from critics? "Shouldn't we leave well enough alone, trust in the wisdom of nature?" We may not have the collective wisdom to tinker with nature. But then again, neither does nature. Wisdom teeth don't speak well for the wisdom of nature. I don't think it was very wise to create inside-out retinas that give us blind spots. The pointless bursting appendix, spine and knees incompletely designed for upright tottering, tubes for breathing and swallowing so close we choke, babies who kill their mothers breaching their thick skulls. And whose idea was it for the urethra to pass through the prostate gland? Nature, that's who. Bad news. Our brains were designed by natural and sexual selection. Our sublime state of complexity and beauty has resulted from a few billion years of struggle which has had no regard for optimizing human happiness. Happiness, as Arthur "Sunshine" Schopenhauer elucidated, is the carrot on the end of the stick that keeps us moving for nature's ends. Rare fleeting nibbles keep us running on the treadmill. Suppose we could rig the stick so we could munch the carrot? Satisfaction sustained. Empathy mutual. Trust utter. Love permanent. Energy infinite. Violence extinct. Suffering banished. Everything that nature isn't. Stretch. Blank your mind. Be. Joe Quirk is the author of humorous science books and philosophical novels, most recently, ExULT, a story about hang gliders who live out the Icarus myth.