I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I choose
It amounts to the same:
Absolutely nothing
*
As I mentioned on a RedMonk Radio episode recently (I forget which one: either 19 or 20), I have a philosophy degree. As such, I spend way too much time searching for The Value in everything. Previous to rubbing out divinity, in Western thought, you were searching for The Truth: that metaphysical “law” that you could reference when asking why you should act, think, or believe in some way.
In my mind, The Truth was changed into The Value when people realized that only things like gravity, math, and chemical reactions had inescapable truth to them. That is, you can’t argue or be upset about the rate at which an object falls on Earth (gravity): it just is. (Of course, there’s all sorts of whacky-physics that I have no skill in that would argue points about gravity, uncertainty, and all that). Fine. But things get whacky if The Truth of 1 + 1 = 2 changes.
Anyhow, The Value to me is figuring out the question “why am I doing this?” As in, why am working at this job, watching this dumb TV show, planning my finances, or anything. You can always answer “because it makes me happy,” which is what you often end up with…and then you get the thoughts about “well, what if it makes me happy to kill people or litter” (I’m a native Texan, so I was brain-washed at an early age to see littering as near a capital offense).
Two Questions
More importantly, you can still ask The Ultimate Philosophic question, “so what?” Indeed, once I figured out that simple two word phrase, things went easier in philosophy. Every time you encounter a conclusion or a QED, just ask “so what?” For example, let’s say you lead a good life and get to The Afterlife. Now you’ve got an eternal life of bliss (or whatever). “So what?” Or let’s say you join The Infinite Nothing. “So what?”
Of course, the sub-question in “so what?” is “what next?”
I’m sure we could get all Continental and unravel what my mindset and beliefs are based on me liking those two questions. And then get crazy-recursive and ask “so what?”
I file this line of hazy thinking and practice away under a mental-category called climbing the value chain. That is, you’re always trying to find the pre-cursor thinking that lead to the current conclusion. The problem is, it never ends when you take Divine Beings out of the equation. That was the great thing about that role in though: part of it’s being/prupose was to be the end of the line. No more questions once you read that.
Which, in itself, was and is frustrating: the cause that has no cause. Our assumption is that everything must have a cause…and “cause” is a slippery fucker in that if you believe that something is causeless, you still have that nagging question, “what caused it to be causeless?”
Money as Value
In my job, much revolves around money as value. You can judge the effect of an IT/technology decision by how much money it makes the vendor and customers who use it or saves the customers. This is fine for the context of business: the whole purpose, The Goal, of business is to make money in either all or some of the short, medium, and long terms.
But pulling money into your personal life is another affair. It’s usually a matter of security, wish-fullfillment, and/or pride. Of those three, as Imperial Grunts argues, security seems like the necessary foundation for anything: it’s kind of like the reverse on Montaigne’s “why I don’t fear death argument”: if I’m not secure, how can I worry about anything? If I lack security, do I even properly exist anything but a meat-pawn?
The other two are fun, sure, but they’re not philosophically satisfying answers. Of course, you could argue in a Freudian approach that thinking that is just a way of deal with the mental torment of not having loads of loot: that is, whatever you think is Truth or Value is simply a way of justifying the state of life you’re in because the crucial thing in life is feeling Justified.
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