Unintentionally ugly reverie

Dear diary,

I’m imagining a person whose resources are unlimited and…

First we need to give our person a name. He must be male. Alright, “Man” is a good name. Let’s call him Man.

So I’m imagining Man. His wealth is limitless, yet he’s dissatisfied. So, now, he will try out a bunch of different options to see if any can please him.

The first idea that Man attempts, to see if he might get some satisfaction, is unrestricted eating. He takes in all the food & drink that he wants. He does not bother with thots about diet or nutrition: he simply consumes as much as he likes, whenever he likes, of whatever he likes. And every type of fare is freely available: aperitifs, madeleines; various types of high cuisine — there is nothing that Man desires which he cannot have.

Now, this lifestyle of ceaselessly eating — does it satisfy Man? Yes, it satisfies Man.

Wow that was easy. But I don’t wanna end this experiment here, so let me continue to test my imagined being. Maybe we can break him.

So Man eats and eats. He’s totally satisfied, despite not having any family or friends (as we neglected to invent them for him). It turns out that our male human does not need to experience the sensation of bodily touch, intellectual stimulation from others of his kind, or any further mental or social interaction, to maintain his happiness. He only needs a supply of food and drink.

But our original intention was to see if Man might ruin himself, even if he is given perfect conditions. So let us think what disaster might befall him... How about he gets a disease from consuming too much. Or perhaps gains too much weight.

Yes, that’s it. Man grows fatter until he can barely move. He acquires various diseases that leave him in pain.

What next? — Well, the Divine Instruction Manual that Man’s been reading strongly recommends having children. OK; consider it done.

Man now has four children, and they are struggling to make ends meet in this cold harsh world. For Man’s children do not possess unlimited resources (apparently that gene did not get passed on to them): they must work constantly in order to pay rent and purchase food. Then Man’s children grow up and bring forth children of their own: these are Man’s grandchildren. Man loves his grandchildren.

Are we gonna solve Man’s obesity problem and cure his diseases? Sure. Let’s give him a medical plan from a private insurer, so that a doctor can help mitigate those woes so familiar to gourmands; also let a pharmacist prescribe drugs to mask Man’s pain.

Voila! Man is fixed. Now only his children are struggling; and so are those grandkids, whom Man adores. Should we similarly ease the burdens of his offspring — give them money to eat and to pay the rent; then allow them medical care — and extend this offer unto his grandchildren as well? No: it’s not our concern to succor these kids, the way it was to save our Man. Why? Cuz we can only feel for Man, thru Man, with Man: we can’t feel for, thru, or with his progeny: they’re more abstract to us — they matter to us only insofar as they matter to Man, and Man feels pity for their struggle; but this pity is almost pleasant: it leaves Man convinced, on some semi-conscious level, that he deserves this comparatively luxurious life that we’ve given him, which is remarkably easier than the lives that we’ve given his kids. These children of his were born with undisclosed amounts of potential that remains untapped, and his grandkids are sweeties; but they’re no match for Man. If Man were to vanish, the world would really have lost something special.

Alright, so now let’s allow the earth itself to begin to change rapidly and for the worse, with regard to human sustainability. Man’s grandchildren now show up on his doorstep saying, “Father, help us! the climate’s in chaos, and it’s all God’s fault: this threatens the continuance of every single form of life on earth, except maybe certain types of bacteria and viruses (or the radioactive scum that haunts the swamps near toxic dumps and ranks zero on the cute-meter). Plus we lack health care, because we live in medieval times — life is cheap and death is rife — for all goods & services are tethered to capital, including the prevention & treatment of illness, yet we cannot find a way to earn a single coin. This lack of money has led to a shortage of necessities. Without your cooperation, we are lost, one and all: both thee and we; for, as the economic mismanagement threatens our individual existences, the climate chaos threatens our collective existence; and these share the selfsame cause, behold: the former spawns the latter, which then re-impregnates the former, in a vicious spiral doomward.”

And Man says, “You grandchildren have a boring way of speaking. I will not help you. Or, rather, I am a little moved by the notion of the extinction of our species, but not too much. As it is written (in Graeber’s remarks on Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer):

Wittgenstein wrote, in the one explicitly political comment in his notebooks, that he couldn’t help but feel there was something salutary about the threat of nuclear war since it was clearly ‘the dregs of the intelligentsia’ who were speechifying against it.

“Your individual deaths mean nothing to me,” continues Man; “I do not feel the pain that you feel, for tho we share a biological line, I am a totally separate soul, securely delineated away from ye by way of this big, beautiful, border wall called body. (My own private, gated commune.) Lo, I am your primal ancestor; you are just a nameless blob of offspring. I shall meet expiry either way, because I’m mortal — that’s also the fault of God — and I must feel my own pain and endure my own ending, because I am Man and none other — not the author of this flesh imprisonment but the titan suffering within — thus, what care I whether a million zillion thrillion other people die right after me? Or if they live, why should I care? I won’t feel anything that they do, or that happens to them, good or bad, because I’m not them; THEY ARE THAT THEY ARE. I am sui generis.”

“But you will be reborn as us or others,” say Man’s grandchildren in unison.

“Um... no. I don’t think so,” says Man.

Apparently Man is wagering that events happen only once and never recur. Or maybe he believes they recur but he just doesn’t care, since he can’t imagine the recurrence with sufficient intensity: it appears as only a blurry, vague supposition, as opposed to a boldly outlined thing made in his likeness.

Actually, I have no clue what Man thinks or knows, or why he does what he does. I just wish he weren’t so selfish; I wish he’d help his grandchildren. Or his own children — I wish they had been given better lives. And it would have been nice to hear a detail or two about their affairs. Instead, they’re like Isaac, sandwiched between Abraham and Israel: wholly overshadowed. (See the stories of the patriarchs, from the biblical book of Genesis.)

But it isn’t fair to compare the children of Man to Abraham’s dud, because Man’s children were not devoid of personality — they were in fact brilliant geniuses, worthy of nurture. I wish that Man would at least have bothered to name them. He named all the animals in his garden — the crows, the squirrels, the bunny-rabbits, and the deer and the foxes. He even named his automobiles, and the big rigs in his garage. But his children are all left struggling to survive, living in faraway places that are economically depressed, because all the decent-paying jobs have found a way to escape from the biosphere.

If Man had a wife, she might go to visit these children; she might babysit for them, or take their dogs on walks... But Man has no wife. All his children were born out of wedlock, to handmaids at Man’s plantation, none of whom he speaks to anymore (tho they all remain loyal employees). He basically turned over the whole outfit to middle management: now hoards of bureaucrats run the establishment. Man’s great idea — the reason that he was created perfect in the beginning — was to add a level of administrative employees as a sort of buffer between himself and everything in existence:

Let’s say that you’re the owner of a cabinet shop. Before Man appeared on the scene, you would simply get up at seven o’clock in the morning and chop down a tree, go hunt for iron in the woods, then melt that down into screws, and use a utility knife to slice the tree trunk into fragments of cabinetry, then screw the latter together and sell the result on the black market; maybe auction an item or two on the dark web. You became rich this way. But then Man comes along and puts an entire fleet of middle management administrators between you and your cabinet-making, so that every time you wanna go hunt for iron you gotta first fill out a series of forms declaring your intention, and then you gotta estimate how long you think the task’ll take; and there’s even a box for “time spent on paperwork”, the figure in which you’ve noticed day-by-day continues to inflate.

And the aforementioned wildlife — that which Man allowed to live, because it pleased him to watch them tremble confusedly in his pleasure-garden (he exterminated all the bears and the leviathans and behemoths; they were too sublime for the eye of Man) — all the squirrels and crows and bunny-rabbits, the deer and the foxes were appointed organizations as well: fox overseers for foxes, squirrel overseers for squirrels: departments of authority filled with their own fellow creatures, which have been taught to reason, sort of (it’s an approximation of the faculty of reasoning, appropriate to the brain-style of each respective species): thus, these subhuman agencies are enjoined to supervise their own taxonomic units, following the fashion of the garden’s general governance. In short, even the animals are miserable.

But it’s not all bad. A lot of the charts are showing upticks in regions that seem slightly to abate Man’s displeasure.

Nowadays, Man spends most of his time in a bed, in the hottest part of the greenhouse at the center of the garden, under many thick blankets, watching his garden-dwellers shiver. And they send the newest, youngest, prettiest handmaids from the outer wilderness into the greenhouse, to dance unclad atop the covers of the old Man’s bed, so as to aid his circulation; tho nothing much works (1 Kings 1:1-4). These damsels leave traumatized; then they’re tossed in a heap out back. Again, Man receives no signals via the nervous system installed within any occupant of this heap — he only feels thru his own nerves and brain. If he himself jolted with discomfort every time another body was tossed atop the rest, he’d stop commanding his cherubs to do this. But that’s precisely why things are organized the way that they are. The whole goal is to get all the suffering to take place away from oneself — out back, on the southern side of the greenhouse, where Man can’t see it. And the buffering layers of administrative minions really help out with this:

Say you’re a deer and you wanna kill another deer. In fact, say you’re a mommy deer and you wanna perform a post-birth abortion on your firstborn son Bambi. Well it’s gonna be difficult if you gotta trample the kid to death with your own four hooves. But if you can send in a request to the Department of Forest Management, then the top-manager deer contacts the deer from mid-level management who works in security, and he in turn contacts a deer who works in the parks-and-recreation office (that’s three levels of buffer already, between you and your deed); so the low-level deer employees at the “muscle” end of the scale undertake to ignite an inferno, which ends up blotting your nuisance fawn, that lazy artist who’s been an exasperation since day one; and a great deal of the Amazon goes down with him, as a bonus. And every level of adjutant in the Forestine Pyramid maintains plausible deniability, in case any appointee from a related agency comes snooping around trying to call an obvious accident “a crime”. Alumni do not prosecute alumni, even if they’re wicked immoral deer: the bonds formed in college trump humanity. So that’s why Bambi had to die in that forest fire. His own mother gave the order; yet she obeyed protocol, and the classified paperwork negotiated all the proper channels. It was for the good of the country.