The Shallow, Dirty Truth of Us

I discovered the purpose of this blog. I am not writing to any audience. I am not even addressing any change. I believe something, yet nothing I believe is changing anything in me. It is my truth of the moment that I am elucidating. To what purpose? I didn't know until recently.


I am voicing the thoughts of one of my personalities. One of my characters of one of my first books. Sometime down the years, I shall read this post again and realize this to be a turning point in my life. Or perhaps smile at my bombastic pronouncements. But, why not? If we can't even dream flamboyantly, what good is all this excess? I am not a romantic like Rousseau. Rousseau himself admired Voltaire who critiqued his Julie, as "silly, philistine, shameless and boring". Most popular literature, social media and indeed culture itself today, is "silly, mindless, shameless and boring". Voltaire, Sartre and Nietzsche mostly make sense to me. Classical music makes sense. Some modern music resonates - Indian and Western alike. Yanni resonates. But art, like music, sensibilities and culture itself is mostly moving sideways and back. Perhaps all people at all times felt as I do now, at some point in their lifetimes, but to again quote Voltaire, mindless optimism is unacceptable.

My interest in philosophy was rekindled by Yuval Noah Harari. I especially like his theories about the emergence of a useless class. We already have the useless class in almost every possible field. As an AI-trained, uncertainty handler, I am highly suspicious of any Engineer who mindlessly professes the beauty of AI and applications. If you're smart enough to visualize a machine making human decisions, why cannot you see a little beyond your nose to how human failings will influence a machine making decisions beyond human prowess? Simply put, we already have drones killing without accountability. If the only witnesses are dead, who reports the crime?

I have been in an emotional fog the past few years. Nothing excited me. Nothing upset me too much, given that my baseline was already pretty depressed. However, I cried twice. Once when my father passed away from a cardiac arrest, completely out of the blue. And once when I watched a video of a father finding the body of his child who went on a school picnic in Yemen.

How can any rational adult look at this and not think of their own children? Imagine being in a war-torn country, not having enough to feed your children, and yet you sacrifice enough, scrimp enough to buy them a little blue backpack and then a missile strikes down the school bus? If that cannot reduce you to tears, what is it that makes you human? I have a list of places I want to see in my lifetime. The Australian Coral reefs, the Nile and the Great Pyramids, Manchu-Pichu, Pompeii ruins, the Grand Canyon among others. Luckily, since I have already seen the Grand Canyon, I am glad to say I don't have to visit the US again. I don't ever plan to spend money even on a cheap air ticket via UAE, especially Saudi Arabia. I will not visit China, ever. Money is the one story we all agree to believe in. Money speaks. I refuse to speak to killers like these even that little amount. It makes a difference to me that I spend more to not spend even a little on people who turn the food in my stomach. I recognize that it makes no difference to anyone else. But I am enough, even this little difference is better than none for my peace. That is not optimism. Perhaps resignation, or at least resigned realism.

"Spirituality is about questions, religion is about answers"

What is the correlation between AI, drones and spirituality? Harari says it well. "Spirituality is about questions, religion is about answers"! Some of us have already accepted that religions answer nothing at all. Stories to mask other stories that have smaller stories to smaller tribalism is no answer to our species, if it needs to sustain itself beyond a few more generations on earth. So who gets to ask these questions? If Oppenheimer had found the temerity to ask why? before cheerfully building the atom bomb team, the beginning of the nuclear arms race may not have happened. If the Engineers making digital maps for drones today stop to ask why?, may be technology can catch up with spirituality. It ought to, for a better humanity. Keine Sorge, though! Humanity can be better for a few more centuries or die faster. The earth will still be able to heal itself. It's bigger than any one species it enabled exist.