The Lies Humanity Tells Itself 4/4
If you want, you can – when finally, you can you don’t want anymore!
You want to have sex with Scarlett Johansson, well you cannot! Someone probably can, but most likely it is not you. You want to fly, but since you are not a bird, then you cannot! You want to go to school to give yourself more chances in getting out of the misery you were born in, you cannot because you live in the Malian desert, with no schools within 100 miles of your home! You want to eat when you are hungry and drink when you are thirsty, but you cannot because food and drinkable water are not always available in your home in the slums! You want to carry your kids and play with them, but again you cannot because your deceased heart might blow up from the extra effort! Etc.
You want Gods to tell you hello, speak to you, give you good advice, show you affection, bestow justice on you… you cannot make them do it, no matter how badly you wanted it!
You want to know where you come from, why you are here, and where you are going, sorry but you cannot! Maybe after you die, when you don’t want or care anymore, then you could!
Money isn’t everything – as long as you have enough of it!
The obvious question here is how much is enough? The answer is quite complex and complicated and it depends on so many variables that it can only be a personal answer.
At the most basic level, not having enough money means not having food, cloths, and shelter, therefore not having health. In this case, money is absolutely everything. If you have a little bit more than enough, then money becomes friends, family, gifts, trips, fiestas, fun and the possibility of taking some vacations, meaning money can allow you a bit of joy in a rather sad world. There is an implicit assumption here that I will make explicit: “this joy requires the existence of few people who love you and care about you, and whom you love and care about. Without these people, money can buy you only ephemeral joy. But isn’t every joy ephemeral?” Beyond little more than enough, when you can spend money without counting it, surely it becomes less important. Very few people are in that situation, so for the likes of you and me, money IS OUR EXISTENCE as humans with “joie de vivre”, unless again, as mentioned in another article “the impossible harmony”, we decide to leave society, everyone we know, and all material things and become a hermit or a Buddhist monk.
So, for the simple minds, who don’t like complicated analysis, money is everything for the vast majority of people, especially when they already have people who care about them and whom they care about. And even if they don’t, money remains almost everything.
The best is yet to come – especially before it comes!
Humans have a tendency to often see their future brighter than their past or their present. I have always been very intrigued by this belief, I tried to understand why, I searched in few thousand years of history to find a basis for this kind of thinking, but all I was able to find was that, since the beginning of known time where we can see the future that happened after the past, the former was not necessarily much brighter than the latter, actually it was often a bit dimmer, with some exceptions during the immediate peace that followed a war period. At the end, I had to stop thinking like a researcher and start looking for a simpler and more obvious answer. It finally dawned on me: the only acceptable explanation for believing that the future is brighter than the past or the present is that the future hasn’t happened yet! Therefore, we can give it all and any attributes we like. It is commonly called an act of hope. Another mystery or rather misery of life!
It is all written somewhere, what is meant to be, will be – what a relief for humanity!
If this statement is true, then it is, arguably, the best news for criminals of all sorts and the best line of defense their lawyers can adopt. If everything is written somewhere, our future is predetermined, and nothing that is not meant to be ever happens, then none of the criminals is responsible for any of their crimes and therefore they are all innocent! The only culprit is destiny, it has always been. What a joke!
Nothing was meant to be except what already took place! All things to come are a matter of human design, will, power, and most importantly random coincidence!
Everything happens for a reason – and sometimes this reason is your own stupidity!
Your baby slips from your hands and breaks his arm; the only rational reasons that could explain this accident are your carelessness and your stupidity!
Seriously, of course we can find a reason for anything after the fact. It requires a bit of imagination and a subliminal metaphor about life or some nonsense of the same caliber.
Let us illustrate this with a very common example. Fiona left her husband Andy, with his best friend Colin. We all agree that it is a pretty bad situation. Since everything happens for a reason, let us now try to find the reason why this happened.
The process usually starts by exploring all the bad outcomes that could have taken place had Fiona not left.
Then we filter all the outcomes we uncovered from the first exploration, through the fact that she left Andy with his best friend Colin.
From these 2 steps, we get a list of all the realistic bad outcomes. We then rank these from the most likely to the less likely to happen. This ranking is based on many parameters such as the personalities of Fiona, Andy and Colin, the financial situation of the married couple and of Colin, the number of kids, …
If there are no kids, then this exploratory process always yields ONE BIG reason why Fiona left Andy, with or without his best friend, and this subliminal reason is simply to avoid bringing to this world kids that will become later on the victims of that shaky relation between Fiona and Andy.
If there are kids, then the process strives to find what would have been the worst thing that could have happened to the kids (something worse than their mom leaving their dad, with his best friend) and then make their mom departure the only way to avoid this bad outcome from happening.
Unfortunately, only very few people will spend some real quality time trying to understand the real reasons behind this act of revolution or surrender. Most people prefer to justify their “bad” words and actions with the “good” potential outcome of these words and actions. Not everyone has the courage to find out the real causes, especially the unpleasant ones and the ones relating to our own personality, and to deal with them head on.
To close this topic, I will note: “it is rather funny that we only use this stupid saying when bad things happen. When good things happen, reason or no reason, no one gives a damn!”
Lying is bad, you should always tell the truth – not all the lies, not all the truths!
“I swear that the evidence that I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God!”
This dramatic statement that we have to pronounce out loud before we deliver a sworn testimony never ceases to amaze me. It sounds very deep and solemn, but in reality, it is one of the world funniest jokes and what’s more it is also one the biggest lies ever told. After declaring this sentence, in the most serious way, very many people still tell lots of lies in the court of law.
Self-preservation, protecting the people we care about, and material incentive have much more impact on the story we tell and how true it is than any official declaration invoking the help of an invisible God or some intangible social morals.
When people realize that perjury can get them to jail, they hesitate a bit before doing it. But, if lying can avoid the people we love and ourselves from certainly going to jail, then the risk is worth taking. If the material benefits outweigh the risk of being accused of perjury and the consequences of such an accusation, then we commit perjury. This is who we are as humans. It will never change, nowhere, anytime, with any culture.
I often ask people I know, from all different cultures, the following question: “if they witness an accident where their sister or brother was responsible for a hit and run, that led to the death of someone, would they denounce them?” 9 times out of 10 the answer is “no”! That is who we are as humans. Judas who denounced Jesus, for a good reason, since the former was wanted by the temple police for tearing down the shops in front of the temple, is still seen as the biggest traitor and the worst human there is… Isn’t that example all we need to say about not always telling the truth?
If you are still convinced that you should always tell the truth, think again! Here are some recent examples where this falls apart:
If your son is retarded and he asks you: “mom am I stupid?”. Would you tell him the truth?
What if you were hiding some Jews during the war, and an SS officer is interrogating you about the whereabouts of these people, would you tell the “truth”?
Imagine you just had sex with a prostitute, for the first and most probably the last time in your life, and your wife asked where were you this afternoon, does it make sense to tell her the truth?
What about the hundreds of situations where telling the truth, or not telling a lie, will destroy someone’s life, dreams, or beliefs without gaining anything else otherwise, would you tell the truth?
All of these questions are rhetorical. Please don’t try to answer them and surely force yourself to lie to me and to yourself!
If you smile, life will smile back at you – It might but most probably to mock you.
There is little doubt that we should have a good attitude about life, and try to be positive about it, whenever we can. There are two ways to smile at life. The first way is by believing or at least hoping that your smile will affect deeply the people around you and they will return the favor with a similar kind of smile. This is simply delusional. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously in your endeavor to disseminate happiness in the world, you could probably go through life more or less unharmed, if not you are preparing yourself for a huge bad surprise down the road. The second way is by looking at this succession of moments, that people call life, and not being able to stop your lips from cringing with a smile. A smile that asks many questions, and most of them remain answered. A smile that helps you hide your disappointment from what you experience, every day in your dealing with the walking and breathing “egos”, a smile that mocks life, before life mocks its bearer.