This, That and Convention
Today as i sat at home on my godsized bed adorned with abundant woolen sheets after my evening class at school, i prodigally ate a hard boiled egg. The process of which is not much dissimiliar to newton's observation of apples falling. And not surprisingly, another one of those deep philosophical debates about life and society and therein its entirety occured in this little head of mine. I am amusingly perplexed as to why a healthy normal 20 year old teenager with a decent social life (with its abundant flow of various happy chemicals) who isnt too much introverted as some university and especially most international students seem to be, would spend time to think so deeply and in such meditation about human life and society. Could i not just ignorantly enjoy my near beautiful life as a monkey would ? - having satisfied all his physiological, sexual, social and psychological needs ? Alas, i could not and i pondered on that. I could see why socrates or nietzsche or confucious did it for they were old grey man who did not have wives or children or family, and thus adopted an extended family of either scholars or disciples to listen to their rantings and musings which people much later on found amusing. But this view is deceptive. Could it not be that their lack of family and social life is not the cause of their musings, but instead of their choosing ? Did these people found the banalities of human life so fundamentally unamusing, that they chose to isolate themselves from the society and begin a lonely path of philosophy and of detachment ?
If we think of it materialistically, in terms of pure gain and of lost and interms of economy, philosophy in its purest essence is zero sum gain. Infact it could even equate to a form of de-gain, a mental suicide , a negative form of gain where nothing productive comes forth. Philosophy is related to depression, it is a form of thinking unnecessarily, thinking beyond what is required for daily normal healthy productive living. Could we not all live simply like machines where we did things efficiently and not spend unnecessary computing power on dead end topics such as life and its inherent purpose ?
And therein lies the potently nutritious cream of my discourse today, we are not machines. We are humans, and in this simple fact all is made right. We think unnecessarily because we ourselves are undivisible beings, mathematically impure constructs from which gain and loss has no meaning and philosophy though undesirable, inherently contrues and emerges from our being and our entirety. It is not something we can choose to have or to discard. It is inherent. It is what we are and that said, philosophy is a form of privillege for an intelligent living being much like ourselves. To think and ponder about the complexities and essences of life and beyond is to not only reach down and to enter into a spiritual world filled with the very essence of humanity and intelligence, it is to immerse ourselves into the wellspring of what is ultimately divine and godly. It is to for a moment however fleeting, to engage in the inner god of the human psyche, the closest humanity can reach godhood.
And yet there exists pathetic fools who question themselves for being philosophical - those who deny humanity and its associated divinity, and prefer to live like machines or as i prefer to call, domesticated cattles and these living dead exist on the lowest rung of humanity. Those who would prefer to trade the bits of their inner divinity for the superficial pride and association of their nationality, race or culture. And in doing so, they have turned their backs on the very essence of humanity and of all life, the great philosophical struggle of our being - negated by the very grand technologies created by the philosophical discourses that construe our being. They have became bastard childs of humanity, no longer a subset of humanity but a deformed and grotesque apparition of humanity.
People who have associated themselves more to a particular cause or ideology than to the beautiful thing called humanity. People who have swore allegience to this monster called convention and allow it to become maxims that dictate their lives - turning their backs on conscientious thought - giving it up for their respective conventions invented by the cultures they come from, instead of reasoning and searching for their own unique and special meanings and outlooks of life. A production line of ideology not much different from stalin's russia or mao's china. We see it today again but in a different form, instead of little red books or iron fists, we see it very obviously in certain societies with their distinctively naive and closed mindedness and a profound inability to relate to what is fundamentally very reasonable, logical and simple due to the idiosyncrasies practiced in their very cultures where convention and its associated maxims has replaced philosophy resulting in an extremely bland and tasteless society which depends on superficialities like food and skyscrappers to hide a human nature that has grown effeminate.
