what does it mean to be a human being?

“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to.”

-the controller, mustapha mond. from aldous huxley’s brave new world

i read a recent essay called ‘lies we tell kids‘ that astutely pointed out that there is nothing remarkable about our universal acceptance of telling lies. we may not like it, but we all know it, which is why any childish and otherwise curious probe into sex/drugs/religion/politics/anthropological differences is best handled with a curt “ask your parents”. parents are the resource to handle tough or uncomfortable questions, which means that parents are like the wikipedia for children, which must mean that wikipedia is so popular either because there are so many parents or so many children.

the problem with both parents and wikipedia is that most lies are so pervasive that they become buried in otherwise useless information and accordingly impossible to find. society tries to address this issue by constructing that uncomfortable mid-teens scenario between dad and jonny when we learn that little jonny has actually been watching hard core porn for 5 years and that dad is horrendously out of step with current slang. and so, with a brief few words on love, responsibility, drug abuse, and birth control, dad slaps jonny on the shoulder, discretely ignores the odd-coloured, misshaped sock half hidden under the bed, and exits the room, having finally off-loaded his final parental responsibility. jonny is now a man.

if only it were so simple. as children grow up, they become liars themselves, and the resulting self-analysis and guilt allows for an examination of what is and isn’t a lie. here is an example list that i recently created:

lies

history

baseball records

4 out of 5 dentists recommend trident

tom cruise is a good actor

being successful requires formal education

you can do anything if you set your mind to it

rich people don’t need god

carbs are bad for you

not lies

climate change

while vibrant debate could help explain the reasons behind the need to tell these lies, it seems obvious that lying is a widespread social pathos. in this line of thinking, that condescending sneer “you can’t change the world” seems to prove that awareness of these lies is so universal that even talking about their existence has become banal.

that’s another lie:

lies

it’s ok to knowingly accept a lie because everyone else does

not lies

it’s not.

lying is so widespread that sometimes lies are told by the best of people, like our parents, doctors, and superman. medical professionals, for example, lie when they say “saving lives”, because what they really mean is “postponing death”, which are two vastly different things when you think about it. but because we’re a society that is intensely focused on the short term, as neatly summarized in a 30-minute episode (or, at best, an 8 week series), we actively reduce the individual to an abstraction: “heroic man heroically saves baby from near collision speeding bus” is an easier story to digest when compared to “depressive, lazy, moderately abusive and slightly overweight man who doesn’t go to church, calls his mother only annually, and occasionally entertains himself by furtively masturbating in the change room at jc penney heroically saves a baby who will go on to post pictures of himself passed out drunk at high school parties on facebook until his late 40s.” details are purposefully kept outside the lines lest they interfere with what would otherwise be a simple moral judgement. thus we learn omitting details is tantamount to lying:

lies

not telling

not lies

the whole story

that moral judgements are so complex is a real, practical concern. take a simplified look at two complex global issues: climate change and global poverty. alleviating poverty though improving the economic circumstances of the poor (using current technologies) will increase the likelihood of climate change, which - due to the irony of geography - will have its greatest effects in the countries that are currently the most poor. so are we saving lives or just postponing death? this is a question worth thinking about. unless you are jeff sachs, your issues are probably less global, but equally complex.

and is death even worth postponing, both in the figurative and the literal sense? while we might vigorously debate the humanity of trying to save a given societies, most of us would very viscerally agree that, yes, individual death postponement is one of the qualities that makes us human, and that any society that doesn’t overtly protect its citizens - especially the weakest ones - is inhuman, if not downright evil, lending some clarity to the question posed at the beginning of this sentence. but most of us would also probably agree that universal immortality is not in the best interest of the whole: we’d probably run out of space, for one, and we’d also run out of old people to get bored of and marginalize. this means there is some age at which society believes it’s appropriate to die, which could probably be established somewhere between 70 and 90 for most people besides angst-ridden teenagers and bryan adams, who concur that there is a direct path from 18 to dying. this is something else worth thinking about, but generally held from in polite conversation.

lies

bryan adams is out of touch with today’s angst-ridden teenagers

not lies

bryan adams is not a topic for polite conversation

just because everyone shares the same opinion doesn’t mean that it’s in the best interest of either the group or even the individual. saving a life is good, unless the saved life goes on to become a murderous dictator, in which case, it was bad. saving lots of lives is good, but saving so many lives that the world becomes horribly overcrowded is bad. empowering women is good, but empowering women by creating a microfinance funded group that enables them to operate a women-run factory that takes them away from time spent with family, meaning their children grow up with a sociopathic deficiency for love is bad. this applies to life, but also to liberty and the pursuit of happine$$.

you get the picture, but if you don’t, i’ll make it clearer:

lies

moral judgements are easy

no one can predict the future. because we can never understand the consequences of our actions we can never decide in advance whether an action will be good or bad. in fact, we can’t even decide if past actions were good or bad without being given sufficient time to consider its impact. even establishing an appropriate time scale is difficult, considering that the goodness and badness of people like muhammed and christ are still variously debated hundreds of years after their deaths (or whatever). in fact, one prominent author claims that the human race made its worst mistake with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, which means that the christ/muhammed argument might still have some legs yet. that leads to this inexorable and delightfully unpalatable conclusion:

lies

everything

not lies

nothing

if you’re waiting impatiently for me to get to the point, that’s exactly my point. there is no point and i doubt that there can ever be a point; people far more self-involved than me have dedicated a lot of philosopher-angst into these questions for centuries, in most cases without bryan adams. but in case there can be a point, it’s going to take a lot more external debate and internal soul searching to get to. our society seems so focused on fast forwarding past the reasons behind the moral judgement to get to the juicy part, but my hunch is that when we get to the eventual conclusion, it will be less fun than just beginning the process of fucking self analysis already. it seems to me that there is a lot more merit in carefully considering why we do, what we should do, and who we are when we do than just doing what we always do.

in order to make better moral judgements, we need to stop lying about everything. and if everyone isn’t going to stop lying, we need to look harder, with our hearts, minds, and souls. looking hard isn’t fun, but neither is being lied to.

lies

you can think too much

you waste your time trying to understand

you can never be better than you are right now

not lies

climate change