So, another friend of mine died this year. This makes #2 this year. And much like the first one, I watched their funeral livestreamed online. We weren't super close, but we did talk on occasion, generally about politics and about PC gaming. Shortly before he died he actually told me I should write a book on UBI. I tend to struggle with organizing my thoughts in a book format though, and tend to do a lot better with the free form nature of this blog. Once I start trying to put it in book form I lock up and ugh. Hence why I haven't, and why I end up writing here instead.
But yeah, I watched his funeral online. And it was a Christian funeral. No disrespect to him, or the other person who has died this year (as they also had an explicitly Christian funeral), but please, for the love of God, if I die, I don't want a Christian funeral. I don't want some pastor talking about Jesus. A funeral is supposed to be discussing the life of the person who died. Celebrating it, mourning what was lost, etc. Talk about UBI and human centered capitalism at my funeral. Play Rammstein songs like "Zeit" and "Adieu" rather than songs about Jesus. Maybe "Attack of the Dead Men" by Sabaton if you wanna get trolly, or "Ich Weiss Es Nicht" by Lindemann, which is arguably about reincarnation (and probably more theologically correct than the Christian stuff in my humble opinion).
Anyway, I couldn't help but cringe through most of it, and while I was going to try to work on the book idea, I got writer's block again, and I felt like writing a quick blurb here.
Christians tend to have a very dismal worldview toward this life. Their entire perspective is based on the idea that this world is "fallen" and that that's why bad things happen. That's why my friend died, according to them. Because some mofos ate an apple 6000 years ago, we all have to suffer. We all have to die. He died in a car accident, because some fricker 6000 years ago ate an APPLE (or a fig, it doesn't have to be an apple and that's a western retelling of the story). How screwed up is that? It kind of infuriates me, as a non Christian. Like in the primitive days of humans, this was arguably the best they could do to explain the way the world was, but in our modern era, we should do much better. Our world is the result of billions of years of playing out from the big bang, with evolution being the big thing that defines us biologically. And while I do believe there is potentially a soul component there, I can't NOT believe in such a mindset given what I've experienced at this point, but that doesn't mean we should settle for the answers Christianity offers.
I mean, I believe in an old earth, I believe humans have evolved from more primitive monkey forms, and that we have emerged over a long period of time. I do not believe god made this perfect earth where nothing bad ever happens and that we all must suffer because someone ate a piece of fruit they weren't supposed to some time along the way. That seems really screwed up actually. My friend died for a crime that he didnt commit. And while yes he arguably committed all crimes, the idea of this overly authoritarian god who just keeps track of all of the crimes we commit against his nature like he's santa claus except we're all on the naughty list seems kinda screwed up. Ya know?
And this actually does have political implications too. As a matter of fact, the entire worldview that my views on work and UBI are based on are based explicitly on a rejection of the Christian worldview. After all, why must we work? Well according to the Biblical worldview, it's because some mofo ate a piece of fruit. Everything wrong with the world is because some mofo ate a piece of fruit. And because some mofo ate a piece of fruit, we all have to toil to grow our own food, because god kicked us out of his house like an angry parent kicking their kid to the curb on their 18th birthday. "Don't drink the alcohol", then proceeds to NOT get a lock for the liquor cabinet, and then kicks him out because he got drunk once or something. That's the modern day equivalent of this story. No other reason. Just...you shouldnt have drank the liquor, so now you must suffer, and your children must suffer. And because the Biblical worldview is literally based on a single couple inbreeding their way to growing the species, we're all guilty. Kind of messed up.
But yeah. This is why, according to Christians, we must all be doomed to toil for a life of work, and we must all suffer the pains of childbirth, and everything wrong goes back to the moral equivalent of one's kid drinking some alcohol after their friend dared them to and they didn't lock it up properly. It's stupid. This worldview is stupid.
I wouldn't mind leaving the past in the past and letting stories be stories, but sadly, a large plurality of Americans take this stuff literally. Literally 40% of this country believe in creationism. Literal. Freaking, 6 day, creationism. And sadly, a lot of "liberals" who are still religious don't fall far from the tree. The result is a world in which a vast majority of people do not have a worldview in which they can properly discuss the real reasons things are the way they are. They are literally living in plato's cave, hence the name of this blog, and its reference to my deconversion from Christianity in 2012. They see the world as shadows of what it actually is, they do not see it, itself, clearly. So as a result, all of their conclusions that they derive from that clouded worldview are themselves unreliable and factually incorrect. Including their views about work.
If we instead adopt a secular, or hell, even a new age view, as I would classify my current epistemological views as closer to new age, then the world looks a lot different. And honestly, I would say at this point, the differences between a secular view and my new age view are pretty minimal. Both tend to come from a position of moral nihilism, the idea that all human morality is subjective and created by humans rather than derived by an angry god seeking to punish us over a piece of fruit, and the idea that the world is what we make of it.
As a matter of fact, my political views ARE secular, as I still deem the whole first amendment and constitutional test under Lemon v Kurtzman to be the best way to approach the subject. Laws should ultimately be secular, because let's face it, my spiritual views are based on personal revelation, not scientific truth that is externally verified and demonstrated to the proper scientific confidence levels, and I have no business legislating morality simply based on them. Rather, I must base my views on secularism. I would argue my secular phase was literally designed by the divine in my own personal life plan to bestow this knowledge onto me, and now I use it to make my case. Against the Christian worldview. But I digress, you shouldn't believe anything I say just because I say so. The whole point is that you SHOULD go by the secular perspective of questioning everything and building up knowledge from the epistemological level of nihilism up.
And when you do that, you get a much different view of human institutions. Suddenly laws aren't these black and white idea of right and wrong that can never be challenged. Rather, everything is up to debate and the only things that should be taken seriously are the ideas that can be argued for successfully via the standards of reason, evidence, and science.
My idea of human centered capitalism rests completely on this idea. The idea is that morality is largely subjective, and all institutions exist to serve people. Including work. Why do we work? We work to produce the things we want and need. That's it. That's why we work. Work is painful, it's a burden, it's annoying, we would rather ideally be doing something else, but it has to be done, in order to produce what we want and need. For needs, doing such things is non negotiable as we literally need them to survive. With wants, things are a lot more subjective, and whatever choice we make between productivity and work life balance are ultimately...up to us, as people.
We have this society that still acts as if work is necessary for human thriving. It is a punishment from God, and we must all do it. I would argue that work is a drudgery that should be minimized. The purpose of human progress isn't just to make more stuff and increase living standards, but also to WORK LESS. We just assume that the work aspect is necessary, and whatever amount of productivity increases we make from technology, automation, etc, we just keep forcing people to work 40+ hours a week and seeking full employment to maximize GDP. We act like this one number is an end all to the value of our society. We don't value the idea of having time. Time is money, and you better be spending it to make money or you're a lazy piece of crap. Why yes, maybe I am lazy. Maybe because I understand that this is all a load of crap. As I see it, we should be working less, and freeing people from the coercion to work at all, within our means to do so of course. If we could automate the jobs and all work less, we should do so. The way society is currently structured, we tend to just automate jobs, throw people onto unemployment, try to make new jobs to do, and then force them to take them. To me, it just leads to this existence to be hellish. Rather, we should strive to make this existence heaven on earth, as much as possible. We need to stop making utopianism a bad word, as the right defines the terms of debate. We should strive for utopia. That doesn't mean we'll ever get there. But we should try. And we should do it responsibly, without falling into the pitfalls of the past.
And you know what, maybe I should write that freaking book. I'm fired up now. This actually is a good premise to organize it around. After all, everything in my worldview flows from this premise. That Christianity is wrong. That we work our lives away for nothing. That life is what we make it and we currently let a bunch of old mythology define what it is for us. A huge issue I've had with the idea of making a book is the idea of "okay well theres dozens of books on the subject out there, what can I do that's different"? Maybe this.
I can't promise anything here, I mean, again. I write here on this blog and given the lack of structure this stuff FLOWS. I try to write a book and suddenly, I'm writer's blocked. Maybe it will happen again and I'm best off just posting my crap here. I don't know. We'll see where this goes.
Obviously if I am writing a book I'll be writing less here. Of course you'll always get random blurbs here, like this one.
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