Aristocrats in the Wild

By Benjamin Cain

"No one finds a personal deity. When we think we've found one, we're aggrandizing ourselves and missing the existential boat. When we seem to hear God's voice, we're listening to our intuition, conscience, religious indoctrination, or mental disorder... "No, what we find in our moments of deepest humility and clarity is the substance of horror, awe, wonder, estrangement, and alienation--in short, all the eerie contents that have driven outsiders to renounce the social mechanisms of reality's belittlement we've employed since at least the ancient prophets of Judaism and Persia, the mystics of India and China, and the philosophers of Greece voiced their moral visions of reform in the first millennium BCE... "When we humble ourselves before reality's inhuman dimensions, we doubt our convictions and symbolically strip us of our possessions and achievements, discounting them as ultimately vain and futile. "We turn our powers of reason against themselves, and we tell dark stories, ones with unhappy, apocalyptic endings. We imagine the fiction to end all fictions, the story of how all human history will end up as a cosmic joke, as a by-product that we misunderstood because we've acted as nature's dupes. We evolved as primates to outwit the wild environment, and we've made a heroic stand against absurdity by taking care of business, but in doing so we usually miss the underlying plot. "The existential plot is that our species' emergence and eventual extinction are exactly as important as the wind's creation of a sand dune or as an autumnal leaf falling from a tree. The universe plays no favourites with its innards. We matter to ourselves because we're vain, big-brained primates, but we don't matter to whatever's unfolding in the intergalactic context. "Reckoning with the deepest truth is the greatest humiliation, and in doing so we're liable to go mad with depression or psychopathic glee. Philosophy and science are dangerous in this respect, which is why they're less popular than the toy religions and mainstream entertainment. "This is all quite disheartening, I'm sure. But cheer up, because resignation, renunciation, and philosophical pessimism aren't the only ways to honour cosmic absurdity. The tragic heroism of humanists who seek social and technological progress is a surefire vessel for the underlying strangeness. Nothing escapes the clutches of Absurdity if you squint at the thing hard enough. It's just a question of appreciating what you're looking at. "The relevant difference, then, is between participating in society as a disgraceful, blundering dupe, and doing so with some sobering--but perhaps not altogether debilitating--existential perspective." The above is a passage from "The Reckoning for Our Routine Suppressions of Epiphany," in Aristocrats in the Wild .

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CSYR1JSQ
• ISBN13: 9798876878427
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 550 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.2" x 6.0"