#251

If a human being makes an honest attempt at formulating their decisions with an eye towards eliminating hypocrisy in their existential process, they will find their field of action severely limited. Depending on a variety of contexts, and depending also on the individual's ability to detect manifold contradictions, this may even mean that no action is possible, ever, anywhere. 

Similar is the human being who attempts to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A lifetime defined by silence, broken only by the most pitiful banality and gross utility.

Ethics: the art of saying and doing as little as possible. 

Morality: the art of civilization; the best lie, the greatest hypocrisy.

*

Can't stop yourself from drawing breath, can't command your internal homeostasis to just halt, your heart muscles do how they do, you piss and shit, you answer to what you're answerable for.

Who is "good"? Who is "bad"? Jesus Christ, was a question ever so fundamentally beside the point? No one knows what they're doing. No one knows what they do. 

You literally cannot describe even a tiny part of reality without lying. In its distortion of Truth, every truth is a lie.

You literally cannot exist for a single second without killing, without snatching resources from others who need them just as much as you do, and every lie you make up to justify or obscure this truth is hypocrisy and the root of more hypocrisy.

*

Let us strike this bargain with ourselves, I say, incorporating a hypothetical in order to feel less alone: ethics are personal, subjective, inviolate and complete unto the singular, but inevitably and mainly rely on and are deviled by compromise with morality, the public ethic, the inherited good, the perceived health of that thing, society, on which our luxury to consider our ethics and the basis for discarding them both rest equally.

*

The whole thing really is profoundly fucking stupid, and we all have to pay for the right to exist to boot. So whatever, fuck me up, see if I give a damn. As an act of faith, as a singular and personal choice, I do my best to hew to what I think is right and honest, and even though there is no good or truth, I hold myself answerable to my understanding of the concepts and accept their problems thereby; answerable to my own idealized social contract, to a purely theoretical, even fantastical society: a kingdom of heaven. 

Existence is a dark glass house, a palace of horrors and wonders--all illusions. We won't see the actual color of the light, or what is really being illuminated, until we step outside. Or further in.

--JL