Politics, Noise and Citizens of the World

One of the benefits of being on Twitter is that, occasionally and usually out of the blue, a reasonable and interesting conversation might break out. I had two such conversations last night about what might, at first glance, appear to be unrelated subjects. However, on further reflection it seems to me that perhaps they aren't so different at all. The first subject is politics in general although the context in which I discussed this was the American political system and, of course, the presidential campaigns which are currently in full swing over there. The second subject was that brand of electronic music known as "noise". This can be anything from abstract sound washes or creepy atmospheres and textures to maniacal ranting into a microphone over a background of insane amounts of electronic feedback. The question is "How do these disparate subjects come to be seen as similar?" Let me try and explain.

The now sadly deceased philosopher, Richard Rorty, was an American liberal. Besides being a philosopher in the pragmatist tradition he was also that most interesting of things, the "public intellectual". He had a lifelong interest in politics which seemingly stemmed from childhood and his parents had been politically active too. He wrote both papers and books about America as a political entity explaining what he regarded that the American political hope was. When I have read him I am always struck by his notion that America is the greatest political experiment that the world has ever undertaken, a bold and audacious attempt to build the best kind of society we humans can conceive of. Rorty has much to say about this. Of course, not being American myself I see in this a deal of what us non-Americans would sniggeringly regard as American big-headedness too. And yet for Rorty there is in the historical vicissitudes of the creation of America, with its Constitution and various Amendments, something worth having and preserving, something good, hopeful and beneficial to human kind. America, seen in this positive light, becomes a beacon of hope for all of us.

Of course, such positive and hopeful talk is always likely to be blasted away by the realities. I'm not a fan of television news or mainstream media but if I look at any of it I see in America a country that seems anything but "a beacon of hope for all of us". America seems set (if I may be so bold) to soon host an election between a racist clown called Donald Trump and a dishonest corporate stooge called Hillary Clinton. But its more than that. America seems a country riven from top to toe by deep-seated and thorough-going division and partisanship. It proclaims itself as the "Land of the Free" but I don't see very much freedom there unless you happen to be a billionaire. America is a land of many powerful myths - and that you are free seems to be one of them. There are those there who venerate the written articles of its inception as if they were commandments handed down by God himself. Yet these are just the historical formulations of certain men at a certain time and place which some have taken as holy writ. Look to many kinds of political strife today and America leads the way on it (besides killing many of its own citizens as a matter of course). Is it the case that black lives matter, blue lives matter or all lives matter, for example? For many, they have a cartoonish political stance ready for any possible happening in the world and this politically-motivated identity informs their whole existence and their view of the world and everybody in it. This is a vision of hell not of hope.

In my discussion last night I talked about this in the context of forms of government. It was suggested that I was taking umbrage at all forms of government when I said during that conversation that the American Constitution is a fable based only on the willingness of people to enforce it, that is, by force. My point there was what I regard as the obvious one: all political power is ultimately achieved and enforced by force of arms. During the conversation I said that the only interesting political question is "What happens to me if I disagree with what you say?" This question was posed to highlight the fact that somewhere down the line force comes into play and it was meant to open a chink of light for those who wanted to think it through and see where such a question leads. The world we have today is over 200 political fiefdoms many of which are nominally "democratic" in formulation but I wonder at the sense and force of the word "democratic" there. It is probably true that any kind of democracy is worse than none at all so please don't take me to be anti-democratic. What I am, in a King Canute kind of a way (he's the guy who couldn't hold back the waves by his command for those not up on their old English history), is probably anti-political. I avoid party politics since the very stench of it repulses me. The very idea of party politics is to represent, stand up for and defend a political position. I cannot think of anything worse.

How this has worked out, at least in our Western societies that are being notionally democratic, is to enshrine all kinds of conventional notions and truths. These conventionalities serve purposes and the people who have those purposes. Political parties have and serve ideologies and these ideologies serve certain, but not all, people. I would agree with both French and American revolutionaries that the citizen should be the most important person in any democracy but it seems naive to believe this or that it could ever be so.  My political question still remains for me front and center: "What happens to me if I disagree with you?" This question highlights, I think, that no one is politically free and that the sanction of "might is right" will always be against you. The truth is we hope to be left alone in the world to go about our peaceful business. But we cannot guarantee this. We live in a world where political powers take things into their own hands as judge, jury and often executioner. Many are those who have found themselves plucked out of life never to be seen again. Its important to note here that, basically, we are relying on other people being honest or playing fair. We don't have much more than this to rely on. Rules are made to be broken, remember?

Electronic noise can be harsh and unforgiving, even unlistenable. There is a documentary film called PEOPLE WHO DO NOISE that you can find on You Tube about people who make Noise in Portland, Oregon. Underneath it are a bunch of interesting comments, many of which point to a social function in the making of noise music. Its noted by one commenter that Punk was a form of music that was, overtly, a "kick against the rules". I think, too, of the industrial music of the mid to late 1970s in Great Britain which was explicitly non-conventional (and overtly political), an attempt to completely disregard any mainstream thought on what music even was and to mark new territory as musical and, more importantly, as theirs. A similar phenomenon occurred in early 1970s Germany with various electronic noisemakers, many lumped together by a disrespectful English-speaking press as "Krautrock" but often known as "kosmische" in Germany itself. These people, too, wanted to throw off the received musical conventions and mark out their own territory. This territorial aspect is important for it is one way we can link political ambitions to musical ones. 

Most interesting to me are the reactions of those commenting on the People Who Do Noise video who completely take against it. These are those who would answer my question "What happens if I disagree with what you say?" likely in a very negative and possibly confrontational way. One commenter describes a lot of the noisemakers featured as "delusional", regarding them as nihilistic attention-seekers. To the suggestion of some of those interviewed that their noisemaking has a political purpose - to free them from capitalism and society - he replies by pillorying them. Another commenter suggests that the noise enthusiasts are "trying to out suck each other" and he refers to their "limited imagination". He refers to the many "interesting noises" that could be made and yet that word "interesting", it seems to me, is what trips this particular commenter up. "Interesting" is not an objective category. People, individuals, citizens, get to decide for themselves what's "interesting". Nothing is or isn't inherently interesting. We decide for ourselves. This is another clue to where noise and politics meet. For the politically motivated will tell you that some political polities just are the case. But there, too, it seems to me that we get to decide for ourselves.

A further commenter on this video appreciates that people can make electronic noise and that this is a valid activity - but somehow it isn't enough. Instead, you have to be like (his example) Trent Reznor who uses noise but has formed it into something more musically conventional. He has made a tune out of it and not just left it in its raw, basic state as chaotic and visceral. This is, to me, an example of those people who are trying to be reasonable but, actually, they are just more of the conventional people. The challenge in listening to noise is to hear it as music at all and most people fail in this task. That is a change that needs to take place in you. You need, in modern parlance, to "get it". This commenter again believes in some kind of real music as if noise isn't really that but if only we will use some conventional artifice then it could be. We can't allow use of sounds to fall back into the chaotic and unordered dark ages. We need to step out into the light that human action has revealed.

I see this attitude prevalent in both musical and political spheres. Where, for some, the chaos and harshness of noise is not within the boundaries of music, for others it is any number of political ideas which are not genuine and true. But, in the end, it all comes down to power and who has the might to bring their visions to be. This is what creates the mainstream and all the accepted conventions of life. This is why so many of the noisier forms of music (at least the ones not co-opted by capitalists such as the bizarre spectacle of heavy metal as done by Metallica) regard themselves as overtly political. This is why they see themselves as leaving the common ground that is claimed and ruled by the predominant ideology and heading out to make new ground. Metallica are a noisy band but they are conventional and capitalist through and through. Its a money-making exercise. Contrast this with the people in People Who Do Noise or bands such as Cluster (particularly their first two albums which are abstract noise), Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire. The latter have their art guided by their political ideas. They are free spirits not societal clones. The former are to all intents and purposes apolitical but, of course, end up being political exactly because of that. "Get rich and live the rich man's lifestyle" is their creed. 

Of course, it will come as a shock to some that music is regarded as political at all. But it absolutely is. By some this is deliberate and they make it plain and spell out what the political message of their music is. Others don't but it can be divined from how they position themselves musically. Do they fit in or do they stand at odds with prevailing trends? Music has long been known to lend itself to propaganda or to certain ideas of lifestyle or philosophy. As the early German electronic pioneers knew, the blues-based rock of the 1960s spoke of American values that they did not share or want and the native pop music of Germany, called Schlager, was tame and conventional, speaking of a different political orthodoxy. It enshrined within it ideas of being a good, conventional German. Goebbels loved it in a way that he did not love what he regarded as the debased music called jazz, particularly free jazz. People like Edgar Froese, who founded Tangerine Dream in the late 1960s, wanted to create a new music that had none of these political associations. They wanted a different canvas that they could give their own meanings to. For bands like this and others like Popol Vuh and Cluster this would start off with abstract, electronic noise. The message was clear: we are not like that.

"Politics" comes from the Greek language. The polis was the Greek city and politics is, accordingly, the business of the city. Cities are where groups of people congregate to live together because, this is the thinking, doing so will benefit everyone. It gives advantages of security and defense and being able to live in relative peace. But from this simple idea things become more complicated. It would be alright if everyone was happy with this. But the truth is some people aren't. People seem to have a need to seek their own advantage and this is often at the expense of other people. This creates difference, division and partisanship. Some try to broach this issue with rules or statements of principle. This, I believe, is what the American Constitution (as just one example) tries to do. But it cannot work because even those pledged to uphold such things will betray them for personal gain. Words don't mean much by themselves and they require people to make them speak. People, it may be noted, will often speak from their own interest and words, even words written in a Constitution, are powerless to resist. And there is always the question of "the spirit of the law" and what such things were always meant to achieve. We all know how easy it is to make weasel words regarding what is written yet trample all over the ideas those words were meant to represent. Politics, it seems to me, is, at bottom, just a dog fight for survival. Those engaged in it will use any means necessary, not least rhetorical, to achieve their goals. And that includes duping any and every body else as to what is really at stake. People will talk of "concepts" and "ideas" but this is just a political powerplay. It is saying "I want the world to be like this".

Most people who make noise, particularly those making abstract noise, are often political too. Their vision is non-standard just as their means of expressing it is. I see such artists as these as those who are explicitly putting my question to society. They are saying, in the feedback and random, tuneless chaos, "What happens if I disagree with what you say?". They are doing this by overtly making music that many others won't even recognize as music. They are causing all kinds of otherwise regular people to regard them as "delusional" or strange or offbeat. Of course, to be offbeat is simply not to be in time with the main flow of something. But who says anyone has to be in time with it? If you believe that life itself, not just in its political dimension, is not a game then we have a duty to ask all the pertinent questions and to take them to their logical conclusions, to go all the way, as it were. Am I free? Will you and the rest of society allow me to be truly free? Or is it the case that "freedom" is a sham word? Am I really bound in by freedom which becomes the freedom to live as the rest of society has decided I should be allowed to live? And, if so, is that really freedom at all? What is the truth of the thought that one person's freedom becomes another person's lack of it? Just as politicians try to take power to themselves and exercise its dominion over us so noise musicians take musical territory to themselves in an attempt to establish their own kingdoms. At bottom, both see the world a certain way and try to bring it about. Both have a vision. And a vision can be a powerful thing.

What is my dog in this particular hunt? I am a non-conventional person. It seems to me more and more that my only purpose in life is to battle all the dumb, mainstream, conventional thoughts that hold people in a trance. I have philosophical precursors in this task, not least Diogenes, the man who lived in a barrel (so we are told) and who, when asked, called himself a "citizen of the world". But the question is will the world let people like him, and now like me, break the rules and be non-conventional? Are we allowed to be free spirits or will the might of conventionality crush us and call us "delusional"? Certainly the non-conventional risk being misunderstood in a world in which the very language is given its meaning with all the might of political force (gender studies is a powerful example of that!). And the problem for the misunderstood, the non-conventional, the outsiders, is that people in general find it easier to be nasty to those they consider "not like them". So, in the end, its this I see as the real human challenge. That challenge is to see us all as just citizens of the world, equal citizens of the world. Richard Rorty, in his ever hopeful way, saw America at its best as a step on the road to this, a step on the road to identifying with ever larger groups of people, extending the circle of our commitment and togetherness, the group of people we would regard as "like us".

"But don't hold your breath just yet," I say, pessimistically. My question still stands: 

WHAT HAPPENS IF I DISAGREE WITH WHAT YOU SAY?

The Gospel of Existence (Redux): The Problem with Spirituality

It so happens that when you read and write about things sometimes someone might send you an article with the note "You might like this" attached to it. Such happened to me yesterday. Whilst the precise motivations of the sender are unclear (but it was gratefully received anyway), I did get to read an article from the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. "The Tricycle Foundation", so I read, "is dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available". And so its fair to say that what I was about to read is written from an insider point of view. But I am not a Buddhist neither do I particularly wish to be persuaded of Buddhist truths. Truths that seem true to me will do. Nevertheless, I took the article that was offered to me in good faith, not least out of respect for the person who did me the favor of offering it to me to read. Reading what I say about it below, he may or may not recant of the fact that he ever did so. At this point let me say that for those who want to read the original article they can do so HERE and let me reassure any readers that what comes next isn't just about either Buddhism or religion. 

The article is entitled "We Are Not One" and concentrates on a Buddhist explanation of its doctrine of interdependence, something I touched upon in my last blog when mentioning The Heart Sutra and its seeming notion of a flux of interdependent becoming. Here the writer, who is a Buddhist abbot from California called Thanissaro Bhikkhu, writes concerned to show why this does not mean everything is "one". Of course, as you might expect, he has reasons for wanting to do this and, it seemed to me when reading, these seemed to be Buddhist religious reasons that, if you are not a Buddhist (as I am not), you simply would not share. As I began to read the article I was set out on the path of regarding the writer as untrustworthy immediately in an "argument" he supposed was against the idea of there being a god. This argument boiled down to "If there was a god he would have done a better job than this". Well he might have and he might not have but I doubt the creature would get to decide what the creator did or did not do in any case. Such a viewpoint would also overlook theist explanations for the world we live in, such as Christianity's suggestion of its fallen nature and its need to be saved. Our writer glosses all this with his simplistic assertions and this gave me what I suspect was a fatal first impression. (You should know that, as with the Buddhist writer, I don't believe in any god either.)

It didn't help me in reading his article that the major concept the writer was trying to discuss, "Oneness", was never defined. I don't know if this was because it was assumed the presumably Buddhist readers would know what he was talking about (although in a subheading to the piece it was suggested the subject is something many Buddhists get wrong) or simply because he didn't bother to define it. In any case, this lack of definition was fatal as far as the piece was concerned and his lack of definition regularly had him arguing against a shadow foe all the way through it. This didn't endear me to what he was saying because half the time I didn't have a clue what he was arguing against. Instead we got what were to me silly arguments that were perhaps of concern to intra-Buddhist debate but of no use to those outside the fold. Bhikkhu is especially fond of suggesting that the interdependence we biological beings endure is one of "inter-eating" (i.e. living creatures eat each other to survive) and this somehow shows that everything is not one but simultaneously that this inter-eating is no cause for celebration. I must admit that I found this point lacked force and I'll come to why shortly. 

Bhikkhu used what were, to me, a number of non-sequiturs and his argument came across to me very much as a discussion amongst Buddhists where I imagine he would of thought he could have assumed the readers shared certain basic beliefs. Besides talk of casting off "ignorance" in order to progress to something called "clear knowing" he made what I thought were a number of mistakes. He argued against those who identify us with the cosmos but I thought he made a mistake there because the cosmos is not an identity or an entity in the first place. We are. So its a comparison of like with not like. The writer seemed to me to not have thought through what he was saying but, instead, to be locked in his train of Buddhist thought concerned, as he demonstrated again and again, to vindicate the words of his holy man of choice, The Buddha (which means "enlightened one"). I thought that he did his cause no good in making arguments for things that seemed manifestly false to begin with. Let me give you an example.

Bhikkhu writes:

"The first distinction is between the notions of Oneness and interconnectedness. That we live in an interconnected system, dependent on one another, doesn’t mean that we’re One. To be One, in a positive sense, the whole system would have to be working toward the good of every member in the system. But in nature’s grand ecosystem, one member survives only by feeding—physically and mentally—on other members. It’s hard, even heartless, to say that nature works for the common good of all."

Bhikkhu's use of "in a positive sense" is his only get out clause in this paragraph for I find myself asking "Why does the system have to be for good or bad at all?" It doesn't. What Bhikkhu imputes into his piece here is a moral impetus given from a human being. The cosmos as a system is not moral and knows absolutely nothing of morality. It is without sentience. It is neither an entity or an identity as Bhikkhu has assumed before already in his piece. Thus, it need not and, indeed, cannot work for good or bad at all, either for the one, the many or the all. It just operates - beyond good and evil. And so here interconnectedness and interdependence, the relatedness of all things, can indeed be seen, casually, as a Oneness (contrary to Bhikkhu's desires) - although I don't think it means much to say it. It is, to me, benignly obvious that all things are related, interconnected, and, thus, One. Only if one has a doctrine to protect would one even bother to question this casual notion. So we must note that morality is human and not of a universe invested with an identity it doesn't possess. If a fox eats a rabbit in the woods and no one is there to hear it… it doesn't matter a fig. We do not live on the front cover of The Watchtower magazine and have no need to dream up lurid moral imperatives concerning all the creatures living happily together for all of being and time. Bhikkhu, in his desire to escape the carnivorous nature of life on Earth, seems to want such a thing and to say that the carnivorousness means we are not One at the same time.

And here is really the first problem I had with this in a more general sense. It is a point against all religions and forms of organized spirituality (which I regard as the same). The problem here is that all these notions involve ideas of right and wrong and often in a "one size fits all" kind of a way. I do not really believe in this at all and see no reason why one size should fit all. It may be that you could persuade me that there are contingent versions of these things that will do service for us for the here and now. But, then again, I might also be persuaded that morality is a man-made irrelevance that always services some power base first and foremost and that, in the end, all paths lead to the same place anyway: the grave, the dark recycling bin of life. What no religion or spirituality ever convinces me of is that its moral truth is the moral truth and this is because I find it highly coincidental that this group of religious people just happen to have got all the truths together where others somehow managed not to. Hence the regular spiritual concentration on special insight or knowledge. Without it such religious groupings would have no basis for their teachings. What can be said, as Nietzsche prophetically saw, is that religion and spirituality can basically be boiled down to morality, a way of living, judgments based in designations of good and evil. This, in turn, gives birth to what every spiritual person wants in the end: some kind of salvation.

Of course, one problem for the moral, as Bhikkhu very much wants to be here, is freedom of choice. Its hard to preach for morality if people don't have the freedom to choose the good over the bad. So a belief in morality necessitates a belief in freedom of choice. Bhikkhu duly notes this and tries to provide one but it seems to me to be a hodge-podge idea that is utterly unconvincing. Bhikkhu says:

"If we were really all parts of a larger organic Oneness, how could any of us determine what role we would play within that Oneness? It would be like a stomach suddenly deciding to switch jobs with the liver or to go on strike: The organism would die. At most, the stomach is free simply to act in line with its inner drives as a stomach. But even then, given the constant back and forth among all parts of an organic Oneness, no part of a larger whole can lay independent claim even to its drives. When a stomach starts secreting digestive juices, the signal comes from somewhere else. So it’s not really free."

Note the adjective "organic" there which Bhikkhu has sneaked in (for he doesn't always use it). His analogy is clearly ridiculous. But who says we have "freedom of choice" anyway? There is much literature and comment to the effect that "freedom of choice" is often illusory and always within set parameters.  You have the freedom to be who you are much like Bhikkhu's stomach. Freedom's not free (not least from within pragmatist or existentialist readings of existence) and this dents the argument here for it is assumed and not argued for noting objections. Any system can have a set of choices within it for various parts of the system that operate along a sliding scale of "freedom". But, actually, it is better here to talk of possibilities rather than freedoms not least because the latter term is frequently misleading and taken to mean "without condition". An example is Bhikkhu's ridiculous stomach/liver analogy. Freedom, if we must use the term at all here, is always a matter of possibilities and opportunities otherwise we must recant our knowledge of the universe and wonder why ducks don't decide to become mountains or windows decide to talk. They don't because they can't. In a physical universe all things are defined by their possibilities not their "freedom". The speaker would have been better to explore his realization that things aren't really free. Indeed. But that would lead to more system-friendly conclusions pertinent to Oneness that our writer here certainly does not want to find much less explicate.  His morality mandates freedom.

And here's the jump: "For the Buddha, any teaching that denies the possibility of freedom of choice contradicts itself and negates the possibility of an end to suffering. If people aren’t free to choose their actions, to develop skillful actions and abandon unskillful ones, then why teach them?.... How could they choose to follow a path to the end of suffering?" Are we starting to get the writer's angle on things now? Now we find out why freedom of choice must be preserved. Its a doctrine. The Buddha said it therefore we good Buddhists must defend it. The Buddha apparently sees freedom of choice as a path to the end of suffering which is surely salvation.

Bhikkhu has argued that Oneness condemns you to no freedom of choice (freedom of choice being something he has assumed or needed due to his moral stance in the first place) and to being a part of the carnivorous system of inter-eating. But what if you or I, his readers, see no problem with inter-eating or if, as I, see no problem with death, decay or even fighting over resources (which all living things do in their various ways) in this universe of our's, a physical, finite universe? Surely these are just ways the universe works? Sure, they can be seen as problems. We can wish it was another way. We could hope, in the Christian phrase, that the lion would lie down with the lamb. But that doesn't make it so. Physical things are always limited things and an abundance of life will always fight over those things - because it must. Life generally tends to want to live and does not always have scruples about how. The issue here seems to be that as a Buddhist the writer wants to escape from the universe he finds himself in to some other one. It is this spiritual impulse (common to many spiritual and religious people) which creates the dilemma. It becomes a moral issue so, again, the problem here is that the spiritual/moral human impulse interjects. (The math is "suffering is bad so suffering must be escaped". But compare that critic of Christianity, Nietzsche, who says "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".) Again, I must retort that the universe is not moral and knows no moral imperative. So where Bhikkhu sees that "each of us is trapped in the system of interconnectedness by our own actions" I just see the conditions of life and existence. He sees something to escape from. I say there is no escape possible, let us make our surroundings as fair and equitable as we can as we have opportunity since we must all, somehow, get along.

The issue then is that Bhikkhu's spiritual/moral impulse keeps interjecting, finding problems and seeking (doctrinally acceptable) solutions. Yet the universe isn't moral: we are. The problem is ours, is existential, not its. But if the universe isn't moral then suffering cannot be either good or bad except as we say so for the reasons we give. Morality becomes rhetorical. It changes from a problem of all Being in general to a local one to do with our form of life or existence. It becomes not a universal problem but one that we must deal with as the people we are. It is, as far as I can see, not about enlightenment and escape to something more real and less illusory but more about recognition and acceptance of what human being is. This is why I have said before in something I wrote that the problem for humans is not to cure cancer, it is to be a human being whether you have cancer or not. Whilst the human being labours under a moral impulse, one which designates goods and bads and seeks escape from the bads to a world constructed only of goods, then we as a species condemn ourselves to never find the very things we seek in any ultimate sense. And we will always be running. This is true whether you are a Christian seeking cleansing in Christ, a Buddhist seeking to flee illusion and find enlightenment or a Transhumanist wanting to escape biology (which must ultimately be the wish to escape the physical world of decay).

We are back to a theme I've had before. We want to become gods or touch divinity. This is nothing more than escaping time and chance. Bhikkhu's Buddhism becomes about salvation (awakening) without a savior. And this is why any language of essentialism is always wrong and talk of "illusion" and "real" worlds is misguided. It trades on the idea there is something better waiting for us if only we could reach it. And that is nothing more or less than the religious false promise that all religious and spiritual people have offered since human beings could first look at themselves and wish that things were different, better. It is nothing more than the human wish to transcend itself, our impulse to dream. We are never more fully human than when we do this but never less the gods we wish we were in needing to do it. This is why Bhikkhu seems to have got it all wrong for me. He has been seduced by Buddhism's narrative of salvation and I have not. He seeks to overcome all things and register some kind of win on the cosmic scoreboard whereas I am happy merely to have been if I must be at all.

I, in contrast, offer no way of salvation or "positive" message (where "positive" is, once again, a moral denomination). I, in contrast to the mainstream of humanity under the influence of religion and spirituality, say there is no win for us humans to have whilst simultaneously recognizing that this is what such thinking is really always about. Humans want some kind of win out of life. I say that existence is pointless and mundane and this does not sound like a win at all. It isn't. It turns its back on the very idea of one. This idea of winning, somehow, is what motivates all the escapes and salvations human beings seek. It can surely be a reasonable explanation for them. Being human creates the desire to create a win. Human desire, something identical with us, is the motivating factor here. But, as Buddhism teaches about other things, this too must be viewed dispassionately and given up. We must be emptied of it or forever run after it, seduced by its Siren song. Put away childish desires, become who you are, creatures of the void in an amoral universe, rhetorical beings responsible for yourself and your environment. You do not need some moral/spiritual win out of life and any you did find would be hollow anyway.

Here endeth today's lesson according to Dr Existenz.