The Real Problem Is….

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Is that life sucks. It sucks because it is not what we want it to be. It is not what we want it to be because we have very little control over it. We have very little control over it because there are 7 billion other people who also want life to be what they want it to be.

Not to mention stuff like earthquakes and hurricanes and disease….and just stupid random chance.

The real problem is that we have no idea what we are doing. Not only do we have no idea what we are doing….but every time we get close to figuring out what we are doing, everything changes and we have to start over again.

The Real Problem is, is that we want life to be better than it is. Life on earth has always pretty much sucked. The strong have always subjugated the weak, there have always been wars, there has always been torture, there has always been betrayals and infidelities and the petty personality bullshit that derails progress, great and small.

Humans have always been greedy and weak willed and violent and not in fully control of these things or themselves. Humans have more often than not chosen to do the easy thing over the hard thing. People constantly choose ‘evil’ over ‘good’….for a myriad of reasons. The chief among them being that we are human and imperfect and subject to our own and others human nature. And Human Nature….sucks.

We write codes and laws and moral treatise and invent religions and establish hierarchies and governments to enforce them so we can try to tell other people not to suck so much. But they still do. And so far nothing humans have come up with has solved the Real Problem.

Humans suck, life sucks….it is an impossible situation. And there is no easy solution, if there is a solution at all.

You can tell humans not to suck all you want, you can hold other humans to the standard you want them to uphold and you will be disappointed every time. There is and never has been a perfect human. We ALL suck to some degree or other. And there has also always been about 10% of humans who REALLY suck. Most of us try to not suck quite so much. The 10% actually study (howdy KKKArl!) at how to suck as much as possible.

Every once in a while, a human comes along who doesn’t suck as much as the rest of us humans: Christ, Ghandi, MLK, The Kennedy’s…..

We kill them for not sucking quite as much and for trying to help us to not suck so much.

.

There are two ways to approach the fact that humans suck.

You can try to change yourself and others to get them and you to not suck as much. Or you can find a peaceful valley somewhere and stay away from as much as the suckiness as possible.

Or…if you REALY suck (Howdy George! Howdy James Dobson et al!) you can exploit the easily exploitable base nature of your fellow suckees to build your personal power and wealth.

As the human species and culture has evolved…with most of us trying to suck as little as possible and to use or time on the planet to decrease the general level of suckiness and spurring the positive evolution of society and humanness in that direction….the opposite is also true. The people who REALLY suck have evolved as well. They have become incredible able and efficient at sucking.

One of the methods they have developed of becoming very good at sucking is to get the vast middle….the people who neither REALLY suck but also aren’t particularly interested in working against the general suckitude….to give up and not care.

As we see from America today, they have done a bang up job. The average human (not just Americans) if fed and sheltered sufficiently and left to his own devices….will play computer solitaire all day.

The OTHER 10%….the 10% who work as hard as they humanly (iow, imperfectly and occasionally suckily) can. To do all that is in their power (which is usually not very much) to help the people and the planet to not suck as much.

Yes, I mean us.

We are noble and self sacrificing and very cool and we honestly do our best to help the world and our fellow humans to not suck, it is a passion with us.

We see the problems of the world and we see folks suffering and we do all we can to help. But WE fuck up all the time too. Because we are humans because, frankly, we suck. We have limitations and weaknesses and egos and human natures. So even though we give it our all, we often fail.

I am going to stop there.

I am not going to draw any conclusions or solve The Real Problem or try to tell you how to solve the real problem.

Because I just plain don’t know.

No one does.

Remember when you were a kid and you felt like adults really knew what they were doing, that they could keep you safe and solve your problems and make everything ok? Well they couldn’t…and they still can’t.

They…..everyone, every human…..is making it up as they go along, just like you are.

The best we can do is draw on the wisdom of the past and learn from history and try our VERY best to always do exactly the right thing.

But guess what? If the wisdom of the past held the answers…..the people in the past would have solved that whole suckiness thing long ago.

And each and everyone of us WILL fail occasionally at always doing exactly the right thing.

Even Leaders…..leaders don’t know crap. They are no better or wiser or stronger than you are….at least not much.

They are making it up as they go along too. (I know I am, to whatever degree I am a leader) Leaders are only focal points. No one really knows what creates a leader or why people follow them….maybe they just talk goodly….maybe they can just say what is on everybodies mind a little better than most.

This is why we need to move away from leaders….why we need ALL of us to lead, to join together in leading.

But guess what?

That doesn’t work, because the same human nature that makes us all suck, seems to dictate to some part of us to make leaders. And once we make leaders….we find out that the people we have made into leaders suck just as much as we do. Or maybe even more, because they actually try to lead…because they see that people want leaders….and they think that they can help…that they can make things suck less. So they try and often fail…and are often attacked and destroyed for their failings. Humans create leaders because they think that a leader is better than them somehow….and they rarely are. But we still perpetuate the same pattern. We need to find a way to all work together, to count on all of us, not some poor schmuck we select to lead us until we find out he is just a poor schmuck like us. We need to find a way fr all of us to cooperate, to all lead together. And no one has any idea how to overcome our human nature in order to do that. Every thing we have ever tried has brought, at best, a little bit of progress.

But the only alternative to trying to solve or at least mitigate the whole suckiness problem is to just give up. Personally, I am not going to give up. I am going to continue to stumble along in my imperfect, very human fashion, doing the best I can…..even though the best I can does, indeed, suck. If y’all want to come along and all try to work together…. to stumble along together… and do the best we can together, and thus to suck a little bit less by combining the parts of ourselves that don’t suck into some slightly less sucky whole, that’s frikkin wonderful. We can support each other through the worst of the suckiness and try to help each other with the worst aspects of our individual suckiness and all work together to reduce the suckiness quotient of the world.

Or …..not.

So there we go.

No conclusions, no great revelations, no solution to the Real Problem.

Just the same blind impulse that is part of MY human nature (and yours) to do the best I can to relieve and cure human suckiness as much as possible.

181 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. a “fucking asshole”.

    Interesting take on the matter eh Buhd?

    • Turkana on November 17, 2007 at 18:01

    we are it

    we are on our own

    as a wise man once wrote.

    • pfiore8 on November 17, 2007 at 18:02

    just in case you needed one…

    • snud on November 17, 2007 at 18:12

    a wee bit more than I suck. But that’s just me.

    Remember when you were a kid and you felt like adults really knew what they were doing, that they could keep you safe and solve your problems and make everything ok? Well they couldn’t…and they still can’t.

    Maybe it was my wacky parents but I never felt that way. I remember thinking everybody else (including my parents) was weird – and quite possibly aliens from another planet.

    Hmmm… I think I still do for that matter.

  2. We write codes and laws and moral treatise and invent religions and establish hierarchies and governments to enforce them so we can try to tell other people not to suck so much.

    On some level that may be true, but I think that we can also argue that “we write codes and laws and moral treatise and invent religions and establish hierarchies and governments” not to alleviate the general level of suckitude but to establish systems of power and control that are often highly unjust.

    One thing is for sure.  That vast majority of middling types that don’t really know much and don’t really care much bolster the system as it is and thereby prevent change.

    After all, how many of them are aware that there is a Giant Swirling Mass of Plastic, TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS, whirling in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii?

    If that isn’t a sign that something is terribly, terribly wrong than I don’t what is.

  3. tune in next week when 5 docudharma bloggers suspend themselves in tanks of water in the middle of Times Square.  That does it for another edition of “Blogging by the Seat of Your Pants.”

    • pfiore8 on November 17, 2007 at 18:19

    it’s just fucking life

    i don’t know what will happen to the whole planet. i do know i’m facing my own end times… the end of my everything.

    so until i shut my eyes, i’m not going to stop doing what we’re doing here.

    i’m glad i found you guys. and buhdy darlin, that definately does NOT suck.

    If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

    John F. Kennedy

  4. I am very non-noble…. I am not sure what I aspire to.. when I grow up I will let you know.

    Sometimes I find myself engaging in mundane chores like grocery shopping and I think: WTF if I qualify as an adult the world is in  a shit load of trouble. In my head I am still a kid.

    • Metta on November 17, 2007 at 18:25

    When I say to Mr. Metta that I suck, which I know to be true since it’s human nature and he goes and says I don’t!  It’s like denying that I breathe.  Thankfully Mr. Metta doesn’t suck in this way all the time!

    I am usually comfortable in the fact that I sometimes suck.  It just is hard when I try so hard to not suck and then poof, the sucking returns.  The sucking gets worse when you deny or repress the sucking.

    I’m cracking up over imagining a world of sucking sounds!

    Metta<—-giggling

  5. This critter, this Nigersaurus taqueti, which I choose to call the Suckysaurus and had a vaccum for a mouth and sucked so fucking hard, he sucked himself into extinction.

    THEREFORE! There is hope! Errr, I think….

    My second point is this:

    And this object thing, ashtray with a William Stieg cartoon, has a backstory that helps to remind me of how we can suck and be the most amazingly wonderful creatures at the same time.

    Here’s my philosophy of life, the universe and everything, gleened from living 45 years so far. Each and every one of us has a gift, a talent, a passion that surpasses all others for ourselves. When we find that activity or thing and pour ourselves into it, we suck a whole lot less.

    The other part of this philosophy is that when we are at last motivated to cooperate with eachother voluntarily, combining our talents and passions, wonderful things happen, even progress.

    Humans have an enormous flywheel inside them, probably somewhere underneath the liver, which takes incredible force to kick into gear and out of inertia. But once that thing starts hummin’ Whoooo doggie, look out!  

    The best “Leaders” in my view, are those who sense the location and status of the human flywheel and know how to get them spinning and can provide the correct road signs and instructions. Then they get the hell off the pedestal or soapbox, pick up a tool and join in the work, and provide regular encouragement.

    I’m with ya, Buhdy and my flywheel is hummin’ All I need is some instructions and a few others with whom to cooperate voluntarily to make some good shit happen.  

  6. I’m not sure what exactly is wrong here.  That human life is not swell seems to me to be a feature of the system, not a design flaw.  It is not supposed to be suffused with great meaning or ease.

  7. Is that my hockey team, the less than perfect Toronto Maple Leafs, have not won a Stanley Cup since 1967. Now that is serious.

  8. Never count a man happy until he’s dead.

  9. um …

    pooties!?

  10. from a point of view called “the living” it entails a great deal of sufferring and an unavaiodable amount of uncertianty

    there is as I know you know no actual problem….

    only from the point of view of the continuosly arising and fallling inumerable forms of life….

    impermanent….

    empty……

    aggregate……

    the bitter and the sweet……

    the character of the complements…..

    one of the sources of our suffering is entailed from our inability to ever have actuality be anything other than a continuum…..

    always both/and and neither…..

    always changing always ephemeral…..

    never “ideal”….

    because ideal catagories do not actually exist….

    yet we insist on trying to percieve the world through them….

    and suffering entails….

  11. I’m still happy though.  See I lowered my expectations.

    All I asked the Lord for was a really neat final horsie ride before the Apocalypse.  When I started a slow trot scared the crap out of me but now I can even handle a good lope.

    • Pluto on November 17, 2007 at 20:59

    • KrisC on November 17, 2007 at 21:58

    You wake up in the morning, stretch out the limbs, piss, look in the mirror and you ask yourself…

    “Do I want to suck today, or do I not want to suck today?”

    Most days I chose not to suck, because if I suck, then my kids suck too…cannot have that!  But everybody has their day…one of my favorite sayings is “every dog has her day!”

    Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

    __________________

    That said, I agree with Jay E….

    It is not supposed to be suffused with great meaning or ease.

    Humans are animals, hunters and gatherers, and our work was once to provide nourishment to ourselves and our families to have strength for the following day to go out and hunt and gather.  We found shelter in nature, we found community with others like us to share with…

    If you look at other animals, you see that their world is exactly that, they hunt and/or gather for nourishment to keep living another day.  They mate because scents and seasons tell them to.  Why do we assume that we are any different, that there MUST be something bigger in the grand scheme of things?

    Life sucks because we are trapped in tiny boxes on a hillside, they all look just the same and we go to work to make money so that we can buy processed CRAP that makes us sick instead.  We drive to work to make the money to pay for the gas to get to work when really, if all you needed was within walking distance we wouldn’t be destroying our world the way we are.

    If we lived according to our nature, we would be fine, but civilization became too civilized…we became creatures of comfort, we want somebody else to clean our home, to make our food, to take care of and teach our children…but those are things WE should be doing for ourselves.

    Maybe indigenous peoples have it right, unfortunately some greedy bastard corportized and civilized it all to shit.

    I should have been a cave-girl, I know!

    Try to make the best out of every situation.

    Life IS good-it’s better than being worm-food!

    • Pluto on November 17, 2007 at 23:10

    Remind me again how this works?

    If someone says something you disagree with — you’re supposed to give them a Troll Rating?

    That’s a zero, right?

    Just checking.

    [hidden comment] You sound like Chris Matthews

    Now, let’s be clear about something: anyone who makes it through basic training is pretty damn tough. Tougher than most of us can imagine. It is not easy to break a soldier. It is not easy to drive a soldier to desert.

    Gushing at those manly men.

    They aren’t “tough” they are moral degenerates and weak willed sheep.  They are trained to be weak willed sheep.  Their training makes them mentally fragile — and let’s face it most of them were marginal at best to begin with.

    ——————————————————————————–

    by: DavidByron @ Fri Nov 16, 2007 at 15:26:08 PST

    ——————————————————————————–

    Others have rated this comment as follows:

    aek all over 1

    Turkana 0

    • pfiore8 on November 18, 2007 at 00:17

    re: leader

    i’ve been thinking about just that very thing (wrote about it on thursday, don’t know if you saw it or not)

    it’s never about CONTROL

    a leader is looking to go somewhere… that’s where the lead part comes in. bush isn’t a leader. he’s a dictator… he wants to control things… and it isn’t even that he cares enough to want to tell us what to do, rather he wants to confine as much of our actions as possible.

    leaders are something else entirely. it’s the whisper, not the bang, that make people lean in a little closer so they can hear…

    we want to be inspired. we’d be willing to endure pain or suffering in order to make things better. we just need somebody to help us unlock the best in us and sometimes the fight in us.

    you’re a leader not because you want to control us or even events. it’s just that you’ve envisioned something we understand and so we travel with you. and put a little pressure on you to keep alerting us to the signposts and pot holes. not for answers, but ways of understanding.

    just because i feel this way does NOT mean i will stop disagreeing with you. just sayin…

    you’re special. and it’s okay. and sometimes you just suck at being special. okay too…


Comments have been disabled.