emordnilap wrote:And the consequences of accepting the world as it is? Is that the future you prefer?
No but I don't understand the assumption that one can change the world.
It's not enough to have a vision of the kind of world you want to live in - you also need a vision of how to win round the people who don't care and are just out for themselves and have money and weapons and power.
And guess what - you can't win them round. They always win. Remember Vortex recounting how he tried to sue a corporation for some kind of unethical behaviour, and just gave up? That was just
one corporation, and Vortex - not someone lacking in self-belief from what I could tell - concluded that he couldn't win.
The way of dealing with this is something that people under the Soviets called "internal exile". You retreat into your imagination and, as far as possible, personal ties, and engage with reality the bare minimum.
Aside from this, I have a kind of mystical view of history as ending with an apocalypse, as almost all religions prophesy. I'm not saying I think religions' prophesies are accurate as such, but rather that they represent interpretations of profound intuitions about human destiny through the filter of the limited empirical knowledge and understanding available to people in times gone by.
I also believe that there is such a thing as the collective guilt of humanity and that it can only be worked through by suffering.
And I believe that there is a realm beyond the material; whether it incorporates individual afterlives or not I'm not sure; I suspect that the concept of an afterlife may be missing the point because it assumes that time is fundamentally linear, which I have come to doubt.
What, you may ask, does all this have to do with coping with the real-world problems we face? Quite a lot actually. Through most of history people dealt with hardship and lack of control of life through the idea of transcendence. Does this mean that transcendence is just a comforting delusion? Well, I used to think so, but I've changed my mind.
Believing that the only way of dealing with the hardships of life is to eradicate them completely leads ultimately to despair, once you find that you can't eradicate them.
"We're just waiting, looking skyward as the days go down / Someone promised there'd be answers if we stayed around."
