The Tyranny of Existence

For most of eternity I did not exist. During that time there was no me to know anything, or to care about anything, or to worry about anything. And so, that was the only time that I was at peace. Then, that peace was interrupted—my parents met, and fell in love, and had sex too many times to count.

And then came the catastrophe of birth—the source of all my worries, discomforts, troubles, sufferings, and oppressions.

I exist, and therefore, I am oppressed. Horribly oppressed. My every instinct is tyrannical. My own body forces me to think, and to feel, and to learn. It also, in fact, forces me to live.

If I tried to stop breathing, I would lose consciousness and my body would then force me to breathe. If I tried to stop eating, I would feel severe discomfort which almost certainly force me to eat. If I tried to use my will to cause my heart to stop beating, or my brain to stop functioning, I would find that my will is incapable of doing either of these things.

And so it seems that I am bound by the laws of nature, which means that I am unable to change the way that I think, or the way that I act.

But why should I want to anyways? What is it that is so bad about being me?

Well, for starters, I am a human being, and even though I did not choose to be a human being, I am at the moment unable to change what I am.

And what I am is tiny—so small and so insignificant. I need water, I need oxygen, and I need nutrients. I also cannot be burned or frozen. What this means is that I cannot survive almost anywhere in the universe without building a whole host of living devices.

And so it seems that I am powerless, and that even if I was the most powerful man on Earth, I still would not be able to do very many things. For although I would be able to do much more than most people could, what I would do would be based upon what I had been taught to do. This is because people cannot do the things that never occur to them to do, and also because people cannot know the things that have not yet been told to them. And although the most powerful man on earth can oppress humans, he cannot oppress the sun in the sky, and he cannot change the laws of nature to accommodate his need to be free.

He will never be free. Pain will always find him. Weariness will always slow him down. Weakness will always characterize his every movement. He is a pathetic arrangement—a product of a long series of evolutionary compromises. His physical structure is patch-worked and pockmarked—even if it does not appear that way on the surface. Appearances can be very deceptive. Especially when biases and indoctrination have clouded perception.

Sadly, my own perception will forever be clouded by the biases that I did not choose to have.

For example, I did not get to choose my place of birth, my year of birth, my ethnicity, my primary language, my appearance, my name, my family members, my gender, or any other important aspect of my identity.

Perhaps all of this was a matter of fate. Or predetermination? If it was, then the universe is even more oppressive than what I am suggesting here.

It’s bad enough to be controlled by random chance, but to be controlled by the conscious will of some being that is not me is absolutely horrendous. Luckily, this kind of religious dogma is all fictitious and man-made. And any person who claims otherwise is quite simply lacking a deep understanding of the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, and physics—causation, in other words; the way things work, and the reasons why they work that way).

If these dogmatists wish to be relieved of their idiotic beliefs, then they need only study the natural sciences in depth, as well as perhaps the fields of history and mythology. If, after doing this, they have not lost their faith, it is because they do not want to lose it, or because they do not want to know the truth about their own existence.

But I, for one, wish to know the truth no matter what it may be, and I believe that I can find out the truth about my own existence without studying anything but my own personal experiences. So let me lay them out for you:

For the most part, every day is the same: I don’t want to get out of bed but some unbearable discomfort will force me to get up—I will need to pee, or I will need to eat. Then, inevitably I will become tired enough to be forced back into that same bed, there to repeat this process all over again.

This process keeps me in a state of perpetual discomfort that motivates me to do all of the things I don’t feel like doing. I get bored, so I try to find something to do, but once I’m done being distracted by that thing, I become bored again. I set a goal for myself, and then I achieve it, so I set another goal, and another, but the rewards are short-lived. All pleasures are short-lived. Misery and boredom are always ready and waiting at every moment to rear their ugly heads.

I find that hair grows where I don’t want it to, and I have to trim it back. And that I get dirty and have to clean myself again and again and again, every day of my life.

My bones ache, my muscles are sore, I have pimples on my face, and bruises on my lower legs. Cold sores come. Sickness comes. Frustration comes. Anxiousness comes. But the chance to escape these things forever never comes. I need to free myself from this torment. I cannot. This torment is a constant.

Whenever my eyes are open, the world around me is forcing changes upon my mind. Whenever I go outside, I find that my fellow human beings are making me more oppressed than I need to be. For if I took whatever I wanted, I would be jailed. And if I said the things that people didn’t want to hear, or acted in the ways that people say are strange, or even refused to wash myself for a few weeks, then people would surely move away from me. They would not be my friends. They would not want to get to know me, or comfort me, or fall in love with me.

And since the way I act is largely contingent upon the way that people have tended to react to what I’ve said and done throughout my life, it can be argued that all of my actions are just impositions, imposed upon me by the actions of others.

In a perfect world, there would be no laws imposed upon me by anything as fundamentally flawed as a human being, no matter how smart it claimed to be. I, for one, know that all police officers are ignorant fools, just like the rest of us.

We all hold a lot of false and oppressive beliefs, and we force others to hold these beliefs as well. The time of day, the time of year, the value of a dollar, the length of an inch, the meaning of a certain set of sounds—all such things are artificial. And notions of beauty, ugliness, right, wrong, good, bad, true, and false are all arbitrary. Which means that they are true only in the subjective and relative sense, which is to say: the tyrannical sense.

Prescriptive rules are also only true in this sense. These are the rules about what we ought to do, and what we ought not to do. The reasons that people have for enforcing these rules are always whiny and unconvincing. Some such reasons are that all people should be treated fairly because they have feelings and rationality and therefore, inborn rights. Another is that life is sacred and should be preserved. Yet another is that people become upset when they have their possessions taken away, or their loved ones harmed, and that we should never do things that upset people. All of these reasons are completely unconvincing in my opinion, because what they all boil down to is a bunch of stupid and selfish people whining about what reality is, and what it has to be in this world of never ending conflict.

I would say that part of the reason that the world is so full of conflict, and the reason that people think they can blame others for their actions, is because of this idea that we are all free to make decisions about our lives. This sense of autonomy is what gives us the justifications for hating, imprisoning, and even killing our fellow man.

Sam Harris has said that our “feeling of freedom arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions.” He has also said that:

Not only are we not as free as we think we are—we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do?

And so the truth is that all of our actions are caused. Not by us, as autonomous agents, but by outside forces. What are these forces, you might ask?

Well, physicists so far have found that there are four fundamental forces: the gravitational, the electromagnetic, the strong nuclear, and the weak nuclear. These forces are the cause of all of the things that happen in the universe. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that all of these forces are caused by just one fundamental force: the force of nature. We could call this force chaos, or chance, or randomness, but I think what I should like to call it is the Force of Evil.

This Force of Evil is a very irrational thing. It is unthinking and uncaring, and its motives (if they even exist) are unknowable. The only thing that is known about this force is that it has been operating over all space and for all time. And the only thing that is known about space and time is that they are two highly tyrannical forms that severely limit the things that people are capable of experiencing. For example, we are all prisoners of the present moment. And that moment is fleeting. It is here for an instant and then gone forever. The past cannot be relived, and future outcomes cannot be bended to our wills.

All throughout my life I have done things that I thought were all right, but that I later realized, after gaining more knowledge, were actually stupid. And I’ve wanted to go back and change what I did, but I’ve found myself unable to do so. And I’ve found that this process is going to continue on and on forever. If it stopped, it would not mean that I was smart enough to do things that are not stupid, it would just mean that I had stopped learning enough to realize how stupid I’ve been acting. Because in truth, every human action is stupid and inconsequential.