It is a curious fact that Man has always wondered what his place is in the Universe's plot - his ultimate purpose, and yet with every technological breakthrough the human race has been laying down milestones towards its complete uselessness. We were born with this overgrown brain, a evolutionary leverage which ultimately might lead us to creating a world that can keep on going on its own (still, according to our ways) and in which our presence is minimally noticed or even irrelevant. Fate has not lost its sense of irony since the biblical times, and our efforts will eventually cradle an existence in which we need not interfere, just as Nature - that once gave birth to our own species - did. To keep us from realizing too painfully that very fact, we have developed inumerous clever ways to veil our lack of use. Welcome to the Masturbative society.
Our features gladly give away our initial habitat, the one we were conceived to survive in. Two legs, opposable thumbs and ultra cerebral development: we are runners meant to manipulate our environment in order to reproduce and carry on with survival. Our bodies are tough, our muscles can be quite powerful. Our legs can carry us, along with a heavy payload, should our arms or back care to help. Our arms are meant to throw, bash and carry, our legs are meant to run... we are natural hunters. But where is all of this nowadays?
We don't need to hunt anymore. Even if we did, we invented rifles. Rifles shoot animals with a minimal effort. Aim&Pull hardly takes any physical work out. Going to the supermarket by car takes even less. Yet some have found a way to keep the body useful. Because the truth is our body is slowly losing all its abilities and will eventually shut down (which we call heart attack due to morbid obesity) when it reaches a severe state of purposelessness. So we go to gyms. We won't walk to work but we don't mind spending 60 bucks a month to go run in a gym for an hour, like guinea-pigs, chasing after a still wall for 40 minutes. Yet others try to keep their hunter's instincts alive: they gather up to hunt, shooting rabbits with guns that would punch every mosquito in a cloud if you gunned it. Then they hang them around for their friends to see and later their wives cook up another (certified) rabbit meat they bought at the supermarket. Fisherman return the fish to the water, kids play soccer on their playstations when its sunny outside... This is the world we have created to live without our bodies. Our mind has taken over the power because our body's uses are limited to those demanded by Nature. And we definitely want more. But we can't live without them. Hence we keep faking their use, just to make sure they will hold till we're very old.
However, I don't mean to say that our society has only renegated the physical realm. In fact, it has quite curiously taken an immense interest in it lately. Botox, gyms, liposuction: everybody wants to show they fake the better. This is actually good. It means society has realised this fact, sucked it up and moved on. Though something worse is also at work...
Our muscles have lost their ability to our brain. But that was a while ago. Then our brain lost its own use to itself. Extracting cubic roots in your head is more of a circus show rather than something actually useful. Even solving equations with a pen and a pencil isn't very useful. Computers can think for us. Machine can do all the work that consists of either mental or physical stone hammering, because doing it is just a pain in the ass. It's not human we may say. Animals can do it. Machine can do it. We won't. This is actually a lot more recent than the gym thing. A little over ten years ago, there was this man at CERN (the great european physics laboratory) who was a sweeper; he sweeped floors at the theory division. But from time to time a door would open there and some physics lunatic would invite him to his office (no, this is not gay porn) and ask him to compute this huge calculation. Because he could do it faster than computers. Eventually, in the late nineties, his freakish skills got overthrown. We work out sudokus and we run for our health to maintain a flesh and a mind that are no longer useful in this world we have created. So what's left for us? Why are we not extinct yet?
Is it desire? Could be desire. After all, desire is what moved us to build this world that relinquishes us now, like a twenty-year old forsakes his parents who are outdated and obsolete. But is it really desire the last outpost of true use we have? Try to put yourself in a stone man's shoes (or rather stone man's bare feet) who, thanks to some space-time wormhole, suddenly appears in 2008. It's like paradise: pretty women everywhere with all their teeth on, endless hallways of food sitting like dull game within his grasp, fierce beasts far away along with disease and cold... What's left to wish? That man would be the happiest cave man in History. So why do we crave so much for everything around us? Why do we just got to have that car? or that pair of shoes? that MagicSweeper from TVShop? Our society has come up with a brilliant solution, a fake-out masterpiece. People don't need the damn 200$ shoes. So let's just hang a picture of those shoes wherever they go and talk about it on whatever they listen to. That'll get them to buy them. We are faking our own desire. Why? Because we can't live without desire. We have nothing left to wish that really matters. But, just like we can't live without our body and our mind, we have to keep our desire burning or our emotional and psychological system will start to meltdown, like a nuclear power plant meltsdown when its reaction isn't controlled by the electric network's needs. That's why rich people who fail to become prehenptively shallow have such mental problems and 90% of them end up depressed.
Damn! so it looks like we're heading towards becoming a silly party of rudiculous merry-makers, cheering in joy and crying in sorrow, while our creation struggles in the backgournd to provide for our basic needs. For it's our creation that has really taken our place in the world. And the fact that we've created it is what makes us unique and essencial to this universe.
Creativity. Creativity is what we have left for ourselves. Computers can't create. "They lack the imperfection for it." Nothing leaves the rules that were once established for them. We are the guide that leads the way into the future because the products of our creation still can't step off the road laid for them. Maybe this is how God felt about 2.2 million years ago, before he invented the humans. There He was, writing on his blog, telling his other deity friends how creativity was what distinguished them from all the rest and Bam! these monkey-looking creatures start walking around, making tools, painting stuff, building towers, writing books. But they were some ugly mother-fuckers. So He and his mates, Shiva, Allah, Odin, paid no attention to them. Tough luck. 2.2 million years later, atheists rule the world.
So which one of our "ahumanist" creations will rule the world in 2.2 million years?
Our features gladly give away our initial habitat, the one we were conceived to survive in. Two legs, opposable thumbs and ultra cerebral development: we are runners meant to manipulate our environment in order to reproduce and carry on with survival. Our bodies are tough, our muscles can be quite powerful. Our legs can carry us, along with a heavy payload, should our arms or back care to help. Our arms are meant to throw, bash and carry, our legs are meant to run... we are natural hunters. But where is all of this nowadays?
We don't need to hunt anymore. Even if we did, we invented rifles. Rifles shoot animals with a minimal effort. Aim&Pull hardly takes any physical work out. Going to the supermarket by car takes even less. Yet some have found a way to keep the body useful. Because the truth is our body is slowly losing all its abilities and will eventually shut down (which we call heart attack due to morbid obesity) when it reaches a severe state of purposelessness. So we go to gyms. We won't walk to work but we don't mind spending 60 bucks a month to go run in a gym for an hour, like guinea-pigs, chasing after a still wall for 40 minutes. Yet others try to keep their hunter's instincts alive: they gather up to hunt, shooting rabbits with guns that would punch every mosquito in a cloud if you gunned it. Then they hang them around for their friends to see and later their wives cook up another (certified) rabbit meat they bought at the supermarket. Fisherman return the fish to the water, kids play soccer on their playstations when its sunny outside... This is the world we have created to live without our bodies. Our mind has taken over the power because our body's uses are limited to those demanded by Nature. And we definitely want more. But we can't live without them. Hence we keep faking their use, just to make sure they will hold till we're very old.
However, I don't mean to say that our society has only renegated the physical realm. In fact, it has quite curiously taken an immense interest in it lately. Botox, gyms, liposuction: everybody wants to show they fake the better. This is actually good. It means society has realised this fact, sucked it up and moved on. Though something worse is also at work...
Our muscles have lost their ability to our brain. But that was a while ago. Then our brain lost its own use to itself. Extracting cubic roots in your head is more of a circus show rather than something actually useful. Even solving equations with a pen and a pencil isn't very useful. Computers can think for us. Machine can do all the work that consists of either mental or physical stone hammering, because doing it is just a pain in the ass. It's not human we may say. Animals can do it. Machine can do it. We won't. This is actually a lot more recent than the gym thing. A little over ten years ago, there was this man at CERN (the great european physics laboratory) who was a sweeper; he sweeped floors at the theory division. But from time to time a door would open there and some physics lunatic would invite him to his office (no, this is not gay porn) and ask him to compute this huge calculation. Because he could do it faster than computers. Eventually, in the late nineties, his freakish skills got overthrown. We work out sudokus and we run for our health to maintain a flesh and a mind that are no longer useful in this world we have created. So what's left for us? Why are we not extinct yet?
Is it desire? Could be desire. After all, desire is what moved us to build this world that relinquishes us now, like a twenty-year old forsakes his parents who are outdated and obsolete. But is it really desire the last outpost of true use we have? Try to put yourself in a stone man's shoes (or rather stone man's bare feet) who, thanks to some space-time wormhole, suddenly appears in 2008. It's like paradise: pretty women everywhere with all their teeth on, endless hallways of food sitting like dull game within his grasp, fierce beasts far away along with disease and cold... What's left to wish? That man would be the happiest cave man in History. So why do we crave so much for everything around us? Why do we just got to have that car? or that pair of shoes? that MagicSweeper from TVShop? Our society has come up with a brilliant solution, a fake-out masterpiece. People don't need the damn 200$ shoes. So let's just hang a picture of those shoes wherever they go and talk about it on whatever they listen to. That'll get them to buy them. We are faking our own desire. Why? Because we can't live without desire. We have nothing left to wish that really matters. But, just like we can't live without our body and our mind, we have to keep our desire burning or our emotional and psychological system will start to meltdown, like a nuclear power plant meltsdown when its reaction isn't controlled by the electric network's needs. That's why rich people who fail to become prehenptively shallow have such mental problems and 90% of them end up depressed.
Damn! so it looks like we're heading towards becoming a silly party of rudiculous merry-makers, cheering in joy and crying in sorrow, while our creation struggles in the backgournd to provide for our basic needs. For it's our creation that has really taken our place in the world. And the fact that we've created it is what makes us unique and essencial to this universe.
Creativity. Creativity is what we have left for ourselves. Computers can't create. "They lack the imperfection for it." Nothing leaves the rules that were once established for them. We are the guide that leads the way into the future because the products of our creation still can't step off the road laid for them. Maybe this is how God felt about 2.2 million years ago, before he invented the humans. There He was, writing on his blog, telling his other deity friends how creativity was what distinguished them from all the rest and Bam! these monkey-looking creatures start walking around, making tools, painting stuff, building towers, writing books. But they were some ugly mother-fuckers. So He and his mates, Shiva, Allah, Odin, paid no attention to them. Tough luck. 2.2 million years later, atheists rule the world.
So which one of our "ahumanist" creations will rule the world in 2.2 million years?
3 comments:
what you need is a pair of slaps
Gostei deste artigo! Bom trabalho! :)
Depois comento cm mais tempo, mas estou nos preparativos para a partida e n tenho mm tempo!
para ja, fica so uma nota: gostei =)
continuo a espera da morada!
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