Every statement should end with a question mark?

My friend Ryan Georgioff recently wrote,

Naturally, I can't help but feel this is one big cosmic joke.

Have you felt it? That hesitant panic that maybe you've been duped, been done over by Zeus and his Creons?

I'm not the first to feel it, I know, but when the curtain falls and Jesus is standing there with uncorked champagne toasting the end of life-as-we-know-it... well, that would just be fucking bizarre.

But no moreso than, say, the way life-as-we-know-it operates.

You really shouldn't read something like Ishmael if you're looking for inner peace, and you sure as hell shouldn't be reading anarchist literature. Yet this is how I've spent my recent days, pondering the perilous paths of precedents in full knowledge of the futile nature of my quest... yet questing nonetheless.

Oh, where my journey has taken me!

In my mind I have smashed the bank teller window and spray-painted vulgar graffiti on the McDonald's arch. I have marched hand-in-hand with flower children and acid-tripping hippies from the Nineteen-Sixties. When the riot police machines come I always throw their tear gas back to them, though they've forgotten how to cry. These glorious and grandiose dreams are then beset by the realities of my life.

No job, no money, and no real desire to have either. Like I said, don't look to Ishmael for a reason to keep at your mindless job or for motivation to stick it out and finish that lingering degree.

My mind is all-over-the-fucking-place.

I am posting this because I can, despite the fact that it's all shit. And to think I want to write for a living.

Ryan approaches his search for personal and spiritual enlightenment with passionate honesty. I admire his courage: I can vouch from personal experience it's terrifying to set off into the wilderness. Imagine climbing the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Half way up you meet an obstacle, only passable by unclipping yourself from your safety ropes. You face a sickening choice: unclip and keep climbing, or stick with the safety net and lower yourself back to the banal you climbed to escape.

Ryan and I both left our ropes behind. We're at various stages in that climb up Half Dome now. While he's championing his choice, "Oh, where my journey has taken me!", I'm second-guessing myself, clinging wearily to the perilous cliff, wondering if the ropes were really so constraining, if the institutions I abandoned were really so corrupt, really so evil, and imagining how happy my life could have been within them.

Certainly a grassy meadow, however illusory, appeals to a ropeless climber a kilometer above.

While Ryan reveled in the glory of the climb in his post above, I questioned our sanity, in my comment below:

What if this isn't all one cosmic joke. What if it's all true. What if in our efforts to tear down artifice, we pile the rubble in the doorways, walling ourselves in for a cloistered death. Starving ourselves of options by writing off entire movements, entire economies, entire ideas.

What if unfettered embracing, rejoicing, ego, and amorality, really is evil -- what if we evolved into orderly species because those who were disposed towards order procreated most successfully.

What if anarchy is what we fear in mobs. Just it's been tempered so far by the police. What if The Man is like Jesus said: established by Divine Right. And the police are God's fingertips, loving us toughly, for our own good.

What if McDonald's and Dow Chemical and British Petroleum really are symbols of the holiest system of social-darwinism ever devised by the divinely-inspired minds of righteously misogynistic white men. What if WE are genetically defective, unevolved. Is that why we despise dinero. Rejecting the nutrients that sustain us, like a baby refusing a breast.

What if we reach utopia. What if we hate that we've achieved equality and found no superior being to blame. What if we're not optimists. What if we're whiners. What if what Buddha was trying to say was stop suffering for your ideals, detach yourself from your humanitarian lust for justice, put on a suit, smile, and swallow the cum.

The ineffable inner cheer

John Nemo Galt posted a response to my post which decried our correlation of economics and happiness.

If you read Galt's response you probably noted he sought very precise, objective answers to questions about measuring success. Is success making friends? What kind of friends? Is it not cutting in line? Is it children sharing? Is it the depth of conversations?

All of his questions were in response to assertions I made in my post. I listed alternative methods for measuring happiness. Galt's questions forced me to reconsider. I admit, he caught me saying something I didn't mean.

In attempting to fend of economic measurements I missed the core issue: it's not how we measure, it's measurement itself.

Success is subjective. To Maslow it was scaling a heirarchy to attain self-actualization. To Freud it was acknowledging the subconscious. For Nietzsche it was discovering one's will-to-power and chasing it down. To Aristotle it was achieving an end one was designed for -- the entelechy. Mill saw success as the most happy people possible, which depended on means of measurement. To Frankl success was the demand society or individuals placed on a person -- not fulfilling the demand, but merely a person realizing they are necessary. To Marx it was reconnecting the laborer to his product. To Gandhi it was living in harmony with people and environment. To the Hebrews and to Jesus it was a similar harmony with all beings and circumstances. To Carson McCullers, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, etc, success was in the struggle.

Some of these subjective concepts of success can be measured objectively, especially Maslow's, Mill's and Marx's. However, many others are immeasurable.

In consideration for the various ideas of success, perhaps all measurement should be eliminated. The heralding of economic growth as success does not appear as success to me, nor perhaps to many others.

I would be saddened to see someone who held harmony as their success be disregarded because their success was not profitable. The trend is changing, as more often, successful harmony with our environment is lauded. The end results of the Green movement are measurable -- the temperature or the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere -- but the human element of collaboration and innovation is not.

I find myself identifying with Frankl, Nietzche and Gandhi (ironic, no?). I think the Western world identifies itself with Mill and thus we measure the economy to measure success as it provides the most good for the most people (theoretically, capitalistically, at least).