I am trapped on this prison planet, this Hell realm, and there's no escape but death. Even death may be just part of the cycle of infinite rebirth, as I reincarnate again and again. I may not escape saṃsāra in this life, but I have gained some spiritual insight which may help me on my journey; whether this is progress or regression, I may not know. This is what I think so far:
- Life is bizarrely unjust: nobody deserves their lot in life, whether good or bad.
- Demons can only act through wicked people, and there are more wicked people today than ever existed.
- There can only be redemption after death, hence wickedness often goes unpunished in life.
- Each life is a net negative experience, as suffering far outweighs temporary pleasures, this is a necessary condition for spiritual growth.
Modern slavery
Modern civilization is what slavery at scale looks like. Nation states are like vast, open-air prisons, guarded by militaries which serve not only to defend from foreign entities, but to assert the monopoly on violence of the state against its own citizens. One can feel the implicit threat of violence whenever one pays bills and taxes, goes to work to pay said bills and taxes, acquires a permit or license, fills out paperwork, etc. All of it is in service of getting the government off one's back.
Every nation state on Earth operates under the same principles. While slavery is very old, the emergence of nation states is relatively recent in human history, starting after the decline of feudal states in medieval Europe, and becoming the dominant, or only form of governance in the modern age. We are living through the "nation state" era of human civilization, which has borne industrial scale oppression and warfare on this planet.
Nearly every economy has converged on capitalism, even nominally socialist countries, as capitalism is the most efficient way to allocate resources, as top-down fascistic solutions like central planning never worked in practice. The maximal exploitation of citizens is done in the most optimal manner via capitalist ideology. One either belongs to the capital class, or the vast majority of the underclass which serves them, many in the latter group think they are the former. Nobody born on this Earth deserves to work most of their adult life away in exchange for what is ultimately worthless fiat currency, yet here we are.
The vacuity of the material life is rarely stated, but regularly revealed by the bugmen who humble-brag on Blind expressing their insecurities about falling behind in the ever so brutal rat race of globo-homo material society. Even this materially wealthy subset of people aren't very happy, highly stressed, and on the whole aren't having more kids than regular folk, maybe even less.
Misery index
I theorize that it isn't economic conditions that are the main cause of misery, but lack of meaningful relationships and hostile, low-trust culture. There isn't a single cause for the destruction of the social contract: the financialization of social connections, commodification of sexual relations, decline in spirituality, to name a few. Humans generally need relationships and communities to not be suicidally depressed. Love is a binding force and it binds forever, while hatred separates us from each other (and often for good cause).
People rarely experience being backstabbed directly, but often experience all of the second-order and downstream effects of low-trust culture. It's why meeting people in real life is on the decline, people rarely know their neighbors or find their partners in physical spaces, and children aren't allowed to roam outside anymore. There's a culture of fear where today's friend could be tomorrow's enemy, each person could be an informant to glowniggers and screw someone's life over or get their loved ones killed for no personal gain.
Animals in captivity often refuse to breed, some preferring masturbation, and humans are no different. When captivity is all one has known for their entire life, it would seem unethical to bring another life into being under such conditions. Unfortunately it is only higher intellect which is capable of realizing this, hence we get real-life Idiocracy, where r-selected quantity over quality type of individuals outnumber the K-selected quality over quantity individuals. More people are entering this world at a lower vibrational level than ever before.
Rationalism is overrated
The branch of mathematics known as game theory has been used to justify great evils in this world, and perhaps condemning the future of humanity. Mutually assured destruction is rational behavior. If humans behaved like rational actors in game theory models, we would be backstabbing each other left and right, even for no gain, and this seems to be more often the case today. Consider the thought experiment: you must choose between the red pill and the blue pill.
- If more than 50% of people choose the red pill, people who chose the red pill live while those who chose the blue pill die.
- If more than 50% of people choose the blue pill, everyone lives.
The rational approach would be to consider the upsides and risks, and since only the blue pill carries risk, it would be rational to pick the red pill. If 100% of people chose the red pill, there would be no problem, but realistically this is condemning those who picked the blue pill to certain death. People who are good actors who aren't purely selfish are punished. Implicitly, some anti-social behaviors come with no negative consequences, and wickedness goes unpunished.
I argue that those who pick the blue pill are morally superior, they are meta-rational. They may or may not be fully cognizant of the risk of choosing the blue pill, but they choose the more noble path. There is a priori intuition that causing harm to others is morally bad, which may supersede any rational argument. Behavior guided purely by rationale is partly what Immanuel Kant warned us about in Critique of Pure Reason.
The myth of human progress
While human living conditions are materially much better today than they were even a century ago, humanity has regressed in other areas, culturally and spiritually in particular. Even the one-directional progress of technology must not be taken for granted.
I fear that humanity is taking the way things are going to its dead-end conclusion, perhaps there was a fork in the road where things could have been more sustainable, such as the agricultural revolution. With the advent of agriculture, it gave rise to social hierarchy, tyranny and philosophy, technology, organized religion, and ultimately the capture of the entirety of the human species within civilization. I am an unwilling member of this globo-homo civilization, and there's no way to opt out.
Most people don't understand why they are working so hard, why are they living in a certain way, or even why things must be this way. They may not know who their masters are, who is trying to kill them, who is actually in control. These are the malignant, narcissistic sociopaths at the top of social hierarchies, in corporations, government, and institutions, and they do not have your interests at heart. They are often in collusion with organized crime, and in fact there is a symbiosis of government and criminality (they are often the flip sides of the same coin, sometimes even the same). They rely on the public fear of evil behavior to expand their bureaucracies, to eliminate privacy and take away individual rights, while they commit atrocities against humanity.
The whole of humanity is captured by a civilization that is locked in to maximal exploitation of the human species and the natural environment, at the expense of many for the benefit of the few. I would miss nothing if humanity went extinct.
"Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from." - Agent Smith