The Abyss Winks Back
"....the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation."
There’s a pernicious type of doomerism native to some corners of the internet. It goes like this: take a question engendered with epistemic uncertainty. Say, why is online porn ubiquitous? Now come up with the most disenchanting explanation you can think of: because affection is irrelevant to human sexuality and we’re pleasure-seeking automatons fated to indulge in shallow gratifications. If someone raises objections, tell them they are unwilling to see the truth because it’s too ugly to bear.
This strategy will often lead to correct answers, but when wrong, it’s dead wrong. Sure, people deceive themselves. The world is, in a sense, a mirror of our wills, and humans tend to wish away its coldness. Paradoxically, we look up to people we perceive as brave enough to stare into the figurative abyss—they exude strength. But not all doom-sayers are truth-sayers.
The abyss is, by definition, uncertain. We don’t know what’s down there—whether it’s outer space or the human mind or the whims of society, anybody who’s cocksure about his knowledge is overplaying his hand. Circling back to our example, the truth is likely to be both more complicated and cheerful than human-bad.
Moreover, the average person is ofttimes right for the wrong reasons—they lack the moxie to find out why optimism is warranted, but they nevertheless chance upon the truth. This makes them liable to be abused by doomsayers. Imagine telling a child that Christmas was not a lovely time of the year because Santa Klaus wasn’t real. The kid may not be ready to face the Wikipedia page of Saint Nicholas, or something, but you better believe he’s right about Christmas.
I have no gripes with the elegant simplification of complex matters or the circulation of ugly truths—truth is tautologically good. I’m against dressing up ugliness as facticity. I’m against hacking the brains of normies.
I lifted the subtitle from the Goodreads page of Schopenhauer, whom I haven’t read. He’d probably hate this.