Effed by the Ineffable

Learning stuff is almost always bad. I don't mean that I'm against education as a rule. We need people to design houses and perform arthroscopic surgery and bring lucrative lawsuits against either of the former should they fail. All those things require years of study to execute competently. But to my point, if we educated people just a tiny bit less, think of the amount we could increase the rate at which tasks would be accomplished just incompetently enough to maximize our potential for an acceptably-sized out-of-court settlement.

Learning fails us in two ways, as far as I can tell. First, knowing stuff exposes us to the realization of the certainty that we didn't know nearly enough before. Instead of being compressive and focusing, the accumulation of information is by its nature fissile, never answering questions but always suggesting two more. I want to know how peanut butter is made, so I type that into google, then I'm lost in the rabbit hole looking up Charles Schulz' Peanuts, then footballs, then the non-food uses of pig parts, then the nose to tail movement, then sustainability, the colony collapse disorder and now I can't stop crying because we're all going to die of scurvy because there will be no bees left to pollenate the lemon trees.

This leads into the second problem, the existential burden of knowing. It was an extremely long series of questions along a metaphorical path that led to little bits of things smashing together along a very literal 27-kilometer circle of a path that opened us up to the discovery of what it is that actually gives stuff mass. What does that mean? I'll be fucked if I know. Just this money quote: "At around 126 times the mass of the proton, the Higgs is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now."

So that's fucking awesome. All this time and energy just to tell us that eventually we'll be out of both as not only our planet but the whole medium it's swimming in will cease to be present. So I already did the self-work to let go of the edge of the pool, that faux-solid ground built on the shoddy, termited foundation of Religion, to try this business of Getting On on my own without the aid of any unproveable existential floaties* and I get "oh by the way, there's a built-in self-pushing Off switch. An essential and uncountable number of them actually." Fantastic. The universe is its own immanent critique, made of the stuff that will cancel it out. Talk about your dialectical materialism. It's bad enough we're all going to be taken out, but to be taken out by cosmological Marxism...

I'm starting to think fundamentalists have the right idea. It's a critical self-defense posture: "Look, everything is fine. I'm me and I'll always be me because I'm going to a place where questions are not allowed." The asking self-multiplies, until you end up with these billions of snowflakes written in utterly unique patterns in quantum detail and made out of poison knives. There has to be refuge somewhere and, like the answers, it can only exist in the human mind. What's the opposite of complexity? The unifying absolute. What's the most absolute thing we can imagine? God. Not just the kindly old Father living in the sky, but the omnipresent, the omniscient. Everything that ever needed knowing, all in one repository, assuring you that He'll just hold on to it for you, so you needn't be burdened with your striving. Striving makes you tired and sad and inwardly reflective. Just stop. Lay back on this soft cloud--which is made of fluffy seraphic cottony stuff, not suspended droplets operating as part of a planetary water cycle, as suggested by wet, cold, uncomfortable science--and take a load off your psyche. Take all those pesky troubles suggested by infinite complexity and outsource it to a dark-skinned foreigner. That strategy is already a known winner.


---

*Very easy to find at your local sporting goods store. Just look for the packages with nothing in them.