Ruminations on the depressing annual ritual of Hope that is ‘Christmas’ (2016)

As the ubiquitous Christian holiday season descends once again upon us all, scattering like spiritual fallout from a world-wide nuclear explosion without regard for whom it contaminates, I am once again drawn to reflect on the duplicitously false message of hope that Christianity (in concert with most other religions in the world) spreads as a sort of promissory balm to ease the monstrously unending pain and suffering that fills human experience.

As may be expected, charities and charitable organisations throughout the (Christian) world shift into overdrive at this time as they seek to spread good cheer, hopefulness and optimism. Many of their efforts take form as television media exhortations to ‘give, give give’, so that the oppressed, downtrodden, homeless, terminally ill and misfortune-stricken beings that permeate every nook and cranny of this misbegotten planet will ostensibly benefit from some tangible aspect of their ‘inspired’ message. While the message of ‘peace and good will to all men’ is indeed a wonderful and in fact inspiring one, they go about it completely wrong, in my opinion, for ‘hope’, ‘peace’ and ‘good will’ have nothing at all to do with an imaginary supreme being that they promise lies somewhere beyond our perceptions, that will compensate us for our suffering only AFTER we die (passing from this conscious human life form into a godly one beyond, so their dogma has it; I rather suspect that we actually pass from a state of sensate awareness into complete nothingness myself, or if anything, that the raw biochemical matter that comprises our physical forms simply rejoins the vast pool of insensate raw space debris that fills the unknowable universe).

For me, watching all the usual trite Christmas movies that are trotted out (sponsored, of course, by Philistine capitalistic corporations who could care less about your spiritual soul and merely want your money) is an annual marathon of remarkedly insipid and sentimentally banal trash. I make a point of not watching them unless I’m so unspeakably bored that a 33rd viewing of ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ is only marginally better than selbstmord.

I’m sure that there are a great many more of us proto-Scrooges out there. It’s just that ‘believers’ get all the air-time and us unbelievers get none. If we truly lived in an equitable democracy instead of in a religious oligarchy, I’ve no doubt that more of us would be heard from.

Democracy itself isn’t a totally bad idea, since it is measurably better than life under an oppressive dictator (Saddam Hussein comes to mind, among many). In fact Plato’s ideal democracy was a rather brilliant (if far too idealistic) concept that radically advanced the theoretics of how to organise & administer an equitable system of government for large groups of people. But my particular argument comes with that unique interpretation of ‘democracy’ that we have come to know as the ‘American model’. American style democracy, as it exists today some near-300 years beyond the initial form it took when the nation was instituted, has gradually been transformed into a monstrous parody of ‘freedom’ that differs remarkably from the model conceived of at the outset by the founding fathers.

In today’s American style democracy, wealth and power have brought about the same distortion of Plato’s archetypal concept that wealth and disproportionate Patrician social influence eventually played in the downfall of ancient Athens. The difference being that back in Plato’s era, nascent science and technology had not yet established the sort of instantaneous communication that modern electronic media enables. Just as in Gutenberg’s time, when the power of the rapidly reproduced and disseminated printed word served to empower intelligent and literate individuals’ ability to exploit and subjugate those less intellectually well-endowed, in today’s electronic media dominated world economy, so too has ‘democracy’ become an exclusive arena of the wealthy and powerful…a deplorable situation in which the intellectually inferior are materially subjugated by those in control of that media.

In America, subjugation has taken the form of slavish consumerism, a national socio-economic raison d'être that has cultivated a perversely close affiliation with Christian theology to the extent that the term ‘Christian materialist’ no longer seems oxymoronic in the common regard. The Christian religion (at least in the British model), it would seem, has always had a close modern tie to economic wealth, power and prestige, and even in less flagrant modes of Christian expressionism, modern Christianity appears to have achieved a perversely symbiotic associative connection with power and wealth. On the other hand, power and wealth greatly augmented by co-dependent permissiveness of organised religion have resulted in our modern nation’s working ethos, wherein money sits alongside the Christian God in a pantheon of modern American Philistine deities. Mammon as God?

Since 1900, the further growth and development of leftist liberal progressivism as a force to be reckoned with in American politics have themselves further twisted & distorted archetypal American socio-political idealism into a perverse parody of ethical verity. Thanks to the oppressive fascism (yes, ‘fascism’) of the new ‘alt-left’ dogma that leftist liberal progressivism has embraced, America is now suspended precariously between two equidistant and absolutely polar balance points, either of which admits the need for a productively meaningful colloquy in the respective maintenance of relevant exchanges.

Meanwhile, the greater mass of effects from these dynamics has resulted in simply a more recent example of the classic situstion wherein the powerful exploit the weak (largely through either rigidly socialized material consumerism or half-baked intellectual awareness). Thus, the erstwhile ‘equal opportunity’ that far too many lesser-endowed individuals misconstrue as a synonym for ‘unconditional equality’ has resulted in a nation wherein, masquerading under the banner of ‘American freedoms’, its citizens are either materially exploited (by mindless consumerism) or intellectually corrupted (by their overly simplistic misunderstandings of complex issues).

Although many powerful and wealthy people to the right of centre would probably be perfectly happy allowing those they can’t materially manipulate (i.e. the truly impoverished who aren’t able to afford even the most basic necessities) to simply ‘die off’, they’d never be permitted to openly say so by the equally strong leftist idealists who have (in the most recent decades of American history) encouraged a culture of dependent socialism that actively sustains and supports those that the forces of social Darwinism would otherwise just as happily be rid of.

Meanwhile, the intellectually astute left and the intellectually astute right are both merrily taking the fabric of traditional American ‘freedoms’ apart strand by strand and the overall effect has been to translate any vestige remaining of archetypal American ‘freedoms’ into a grotesquely farcical travesty of what the so-called ‘founding fathers’ had originally conceived of as freedom.

But to return to the nauseatingly smarmy trappings of the American Christian holiday known as Christmas, it is at the end-of-the-year time when HOPE (the single most resounding ‘sales-pitch’ of Christianity, or for that matter ALL religions) reverberates through the airwaves non-stop: hope for full recovery by disabled persons, hope by the religiously persecuted for acceptance, hope by the ugly for beauty, hope by the ‘have-nothings’ for ‘something’, and hope by all of that endless neurotic mass of all humanity for SOME sort of meaning to the chaos that is human existence. Hope, schmope! It's all an illusion lacking tangible subtance.

‘Hope’ as sold by Christianity (and equally by all other systems of religious belief in something higher that humans may aspire to) takes the form of promises that if we’ll all just be selflessly friendly, supportive, humane, loving and kind, all the intense effort expended on those desired modes of behavior will somehow be rewarded after death. [Note: this brings to mind one of the greatest scams of all religious euphemisms, wherein Islam promises eternal paradise and endless (female) virgins to Islamic martyrs...oh boy!] In itself this is the single largest and most enduring con-game going on since the dawn of recorded history…and it shows few signs of slowing down in our modern age of increased secular skepticism.

However it (hope) is exhorted as an inducement to be good and lead a morally ethical life, it is ultimately a monstrous scam and a total deception, for there are many overwhelmingly compelling reasons to believe that all this talk of gods, saviors and kindly-disposed personal deities is nothing more than the biggest load of horse exhaust ever formulated into a semi-coherent belief system (in most cases by VERY bright people who should know better than to believe in imaginary, insensate, intangible Supreme Beings to begin with).

Hope, viewed in that light, is therefore not just an egregiously duplicitious hoax, but a curse that merely perpetuates the same, endlessly predictable cycles of human misanthropy that have existed forever. Hope, you see, is not an absolute necessity for bringing some sort of acceptable order into a grotesquely disordered human world. If one throws aside all the superstitious nonsense that belief in gods actually comprises, and if one understands and accepts the premise that despite our having been blessed/cursed with the ability to reason, life itself has no greater meaning than the fact that a unique combination of biochemical elements linked up to produce a sentient organism, then the argument logically asserts itself that the IDEAL course of human action should be mass species genocide...that is, the extinction of the entire human race.

If that sounds a little extreme on the face of it, that’s probably because of all the highly emotional angst created by the Jewish and Israeli-American organisations that have seized upon the depredations of the German National Socialists during the Second World War to franchise exclusive use of that term to describe their own (admittedly dire) wartime experience. Racial genocide in its largest philosophical context means not extermination of the Jews (or any other ethnic sub group of Homo sapiens) but extermination of all humankind, which from a philosophical standpoint is not really a bad idea. If humanity embraced the compellingly logical truth that gods and supreme beings are nothing less than utterly fantastic projections of human weakness, the only logical result would be acceptance of the utter futility of all human life in the absence of actual hope and/or posthumous ‘reward’.

Given the fact that human beings are governed by immensely strong instincts for self-preservation AND procreation (actually a sub-part of the primary instinct), it may be understood that humanity is not about to voluntarily cease its existence (even if the existence of a ‘god’ WERE accepted universally) any time soon.

We are therefore faced with a need to justify our existence if it is agreed that there’s no higher consciousness out there demanding that we ‘glorify' it by leading exemplary lives. The great German philosopher Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a student of far eastern philosophies and known figuratively as the Father of Classical German Pessimism, was a brilliant thinker who in fact was probably far ahead of his time intellectually in that he saw through the sham that is conventional human religious spirituality (that is, ‘deity-identified religious spirituality’), and recognised that contrary to expressed hopes of saving human beings from sin (identified as actions contravening the laws of the Christian God, however they may have been construed since the origins of that faith), there is no possible redemption possible in that human beings contain the seeds of their own self-destructive cruelty and violence concurrent and synonymous with any higher noble aspirations to humane ideals. Viewed in this admittedly somewhat depressing, but brutally frank and candid frame of reference, since there are no ‘higher’ motives for attempting to offset or eliminate these inherent flaws in Homo sapiens, other non-religious motivations must necessarily be investigated if one is to remain alive bereft of the flimsy and insubstantial comfort that religious superstition promises.

Schopenhauer, far from advocating the species genocide that his intellectual realisations proposed, therefore explored a whole range of alternative motives for modulating humanity’s inherent (cyclical and ineradicable) patterns of violence and destructivity and it is in his writings that are found a great many suggestions to achieve that end. Most of all, however, he himself found relief in the form of withdrawal from the seething excesses of the masses (isolation) and believed that music and the aesthetics of art held the highest promise for ameliorating the depressive predictability of humanity’s more bestial tendencies. In these contexts, Schopenhauer's own precepts to a great degree reflected many of the precepts of ancient Hindu and Chinese beliefs (notably those of Buddhism and Taoism).

Schopenhauer’s thesis of the ‘Will’, aligning itself along precepts set by Immanuel Kant that generally divided reality into the ‘noumenol’ (unseen or imperceptible…Kant termed it the ‘Ding an sich’, or ‘Thing-in-itself’) and ‘phenomenal’ (perceived or tactilely sensed), posited that Will, or individual motivation, was the primary force by which all life is functionally experienced by human beings.

“For Schopenhauer, human desiring, ‘willing’ and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe's ‘Sublimation’). Aesthetic contemplation allows one to escape this pain—albeit temporarily—because it stops one perceiving the world as mere presentation. Instead, one no longer perceives the world as an object of perception (therefore as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds; time, space and causality) from which one is separated; rather one becomes one with that perception: ‘one can thus no longer separate the perceiver from the perception’ (The World as Will and Representation). From this immersion with the world one no longer views oneself as an individual who suffers in the world due to one's individual will but, rather, becomes a ‘subject of cognition’ to a perception that is ‘Pure, will-less, timeless where the essence, ‘ideas,’ of the world are shown. Art is the practical consequence of this brief aesthetic contemplation as it attempts to depict one's immersion with the world, thus tries to depict the essence/pure ideas of the world. Music, for Schopenhauer, was the purest form of art because it was the one that depicted the will itself without it appearing as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds, therefore as an individual object. According to Daniel Albright, ‘Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself.’ He deemed music a timeless, universal language comprehended everywhere, that can imbue global enthusiasm, if in possession of a significant melody." [Note: the foregoing paragraph by Robin Wicks refers indirectly to Dale Jacquette, ‘The Philosophy of Schopenhauer’, Routledge, 2015: ‘Biographical sketch’]

Kant posits in his Critique of Pure Reason that human beings conceptualise the laws of nature, that is, human senses dictate terms of understanding, which are then systematised, labled and consequently understood within those structures.

Following this line of thought, Schopenhauer postulates in his work The World as Will and Representation that we therefore bring into essential being the (apparent) violent state of nature, for he suggests that the individuation that we impose upon ‘things’, is superimposed upon a sightless, striving energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, works against itself, envelopes itself and brutalizes itself.

Robert Wicks, eminent New Zealand academician, states ‘His (Schopenhauer’s) paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, which when cut in half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail. Our very quest for scientific and practical knowledge creates a world that feasts upon itself.’

Wicks goes on to say that ‘This marks the origin of Schopenhauer's renowned pessimism: he claims that as individuals, we are the unfortunate products of our own epistemological making, and that within the world of appearances that we structure, we are fated to fight with other individuals, and to want more than we can ever have. On Schopenhauer's view, the world of daily life is essentially violent and frustrating; it is a world that, as long as our consciousness remains at that level where the principle of sufficient reason applies in its fourfold root, will never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquility. As he explicitly states, daily life ‘is suffering’ and to express this, he employs images of frustration taken from classical Greek mythology, such as those of Tantalus and the Danaids, along with the suffering of Ixion on the ever-spinning wheel of fire. The image of Sisyphus expresses the same frustrated spirit.’

Further, ‘To that extent, Schopenhauer says that life is like a dream. As a condition of our knowledge, Schopenhauer believes that the laws of nature, along with the sets of objects that we experience, we ourselves create in way that is not unlike the way the constitution of our tongues invokes the taste of sugar. As Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) states in ‘The Assayer’ (1623), if ears tongues and noses were removed from the world, then odors tastes and sounds would be removed as well.

‘At this point, what Schopenhauer has developed philosophically is surely interesting, but we have not yet mentioned its more remarkable and memorable aspect. If we combine his claim that the world is Will with his Kantian view that we are responsible for the individuated world of appearances, we arrive at a novel outlook — an outlook that depends heavily upon Schopenhauer's characterization of the thing-in-itself as Will, understood to be an aimless, blind striving.

‘Before the human being comes onto the scene with its principle of sufficient reason (or principle of individuation) there are no individuals. It is the human being that, in its very effort to know anything, objectifies an appearance for itself that involves the fragmentation of Will and its breakup into a comprehensible set of individuals. The result of this fragmentation, given the nature of Will, is terrible: it is a world of constant struggle, where each individual thing strives against every other individual thing; the result is a permanent ‘war of all against all’ akin to what Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) characterized as the state of nature.’

Be all the foregoing as it may, and mindful of the absolute ‘nothingness’ that comprises the accident that is (and has become) the sentient bioorganism that is ‘mankind’, nothing to me symbolizes the blind dumbness of the ‘faith-filled herd’ instinct that Schopenhauer constantly refers to as does the hypocrisy of the Christian Christmas, with its tender promise of ‘forgiveness’ (for what? Acting like a human animal?) and ‘hope’ (of what?...something more than the concrete imposition of deity-divested, personal responsibility for one’s actions?).

As Schopenhauer also observed, the lamentably lop-sided spread of intelligence among humankind, ranging from a majority that are well below a modicum of ‘average’ to a small minority of individuals who are possessed of higher awareness (e.g. ‘IQ’), assures that herd-like willfulness will dominate any collective colloquy established to consider the plight of humanity in terms of whether there is or isn’t any higher meaning to our existence.

If one accepts that premise, then rule by majority implies with no uncertainty that in an erstwhile democracy such as our American model, with its presumed mispretensions of granting feigned ‘equality’ to the entire spectrum of humanity in existence, is absolutely guaranteed to assure the greatest level of mediocrity possible throughout the society. Given that this is exactly what has happened to democracy American-style, the frequently mentioned ‘dumbing down’ dynamic will assuredly always obtain full ascendance in American affairs, as the wealthy and powerful dominate the societal economics at any given time, while the maudlinly sentimental (reactively anti-intellectual and populist) masses concurrently dominate all other (non-economic) considerations.

This tendency of contemporary democracies to lower mass cultural achievement to a uniform level of barely acceptable thoughtfulness was well recognised by intellectuals of the late 18th & early 19th centuries.

Martin Heidegger pointedly seized upon the great American experiment as becoming philosophically problematic in future decades and dismissed it as ‘dangerous’ and ‘mediocre’. Sigmund Freud also had extreme disapprobations about the future success of a society that granted the same intellectual weight in any socio-political discussion to marginally bright individuals as it did to the most astute and brightest (sayeth Freud: “America is a mistake”).

And that’s not even to mention the less doctrinaire existentialists, such as Thoreau, Emerson, etc., or the more extreme ones (such as Nietzsche or Kierkegaard) who take Schopenhauer’s observations to further extremes. As it is, America has perfectly filfilled such dire predictions of impending mediocrity, with one result being that at Christmastime we are literally immersed in thousands of sappy reiterations of unsubstantiated cheerfulness, unfounded hopes for a better state of future human affairs and unending exhortations to embrace a fanciful ‘son’ of God’s imaginary forgiveness. Kiss the 'booie' and make it all better therapy.

As for this last quality (God’s forgiveness), there is a favorite quote of mine (attributed to Roman philosopher Seneca) that states: “Religion is regarded by the common man as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” How true, how true, but then, Seneca wasn’t a goody-good Christian, was he?

Another rather pungent quote, often misattributed to Napoleon Bonaparte on-line (but actually a quote from comedian Richard Jeni in 2005), is recorded as follows: “Religious wars are basically killing (other) people over who has the better imaginary friend.” [Note: The actual quote is as follows: “…I don't get that -- people going to war over religion. I don't know, I could see going to war over justice or democracy or even revenge. But if you're going to war over religion, now you're just killing people in an argument over who has the better imaginary friend.”] Lovely!

Of course the utterly ultimate hypocrisy of the Christian ‘Christmas’ holiday lies in the fact that the holiday is functionally ritualised as several weeks of soulfully sanctioned hopes for peace, brotherhood, forgiveness and brotherhood...followed immediately by a massive case of species-specific ‘humaness-amnesia’ and a renewed open-season (the OTHER 345 days of the year) renewal of violence and brutality till next year’s Christmas holiday. Ah! How soon they forget!

Just between you and me, we’re much better off accepting the fact that despite our species’ occasional high aspirations, human lives are essentially just one big cock-up after another that we are all destined to struggle through until death’s release. Therefore, spare me all the goody-good hopefulness that circulates at this time of the year and shield me from the massive euphemisms that attend the holidays, masquerading (despite being well-intended, if breathtakingly simple-minded) under the guise of being positively engendered by 'God' & co-dependently furthered by emotionally simplistic humaneness.

Personally, if I see one more commercial advertisement for Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital about all the poor little afflicted kids whose lives your generous dollars will help save I think I’m going to terminally puke…

One last thing, best wishes for Winter Solstice 2016…one of the few annual events I CAN accept whole-heartedly and without reservation.

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Note: A few interesting websites bearing on 'American style democracy' appear below:

listverse.com/2013/06/16/10-reasons-why-democracy-doesnt-work/

ericpetersautos.com/2010/10/21/democracy-is-shit/