Looking back from where our society has come from and looking forward to where it is going I ask myself ‘what is the end game here?’
If the goal of life is to make the world a better place for tomorrow and we continue this forever then what happens in the end. Of course I don’t believe for a second that somewhere down the track we won’t fall prey to the faults of our own irrational psychology and destroy our environment and ourselves completely, BUT if that doesn’t happen then what would?
At the end of the urban planning simulation game Sim City once your population reached the highest level of evolution space ships would take off and human colonisation of the universe would begin. But what from there? Lets say we do expand to colonise the entire universe, like a virus, we have eliminated suffering, we all live perfect lives, we know all there is to know about the universe, what do we do from there?
There is this goal of modern society to make life better for the future, and as much as I believe that this betterment will never actually reach the point where perfection is reached, the point I wish to make is that if we did reach this goal then there would be nothing left to do. The only enjoyment we could have if we reached this point would be the exploitation of our own irrationality. We would be rationally complete and therefore find enjoyment only in fulfilling our more primal desires. Is this really our goal as a society? With religion increasingly being found to be false I think it’s about time we start seriously searching, scientifically, for a meaning for our lives. As I’ve said before my only hope in life is that someone in the future discovers this meaning. My only validation is that although there is no obvious meaning to my, or anything’s, life at the moment perhaps in the future someone will discover this. After all there is still a lot humans have to learn about the universe. It is this lack of knowledge that we have that gives me hope. It is for this reason that I am agnostic and not atheist, an existentialist and not nihilist. It is because we still have so much left to learn. The chance of actually finding something that gives a purpose to life may be small, but it is all any rational person has. Without this hope, we have nothing and we are nothing. Hope is our greatest weakness and our greatest strength.
If you do not share this hope with me then let’s look at the alternative option, we reach ‘perfection’ as a society and completely dominate the universe. What purpose, what joy do we have? We manipulate our own bodies in order to enjoy life, we reproduce and we die. In this opinion drug dealers are just as valuable to the community as writers or artists, they produce happiness. If there is no goal, no purpose then enjoyment of life is all that is important. Hedonism rules and nothing else matters. (original written 11/11/09)
