What You Are Going To Do

We spend a lot of time (which is itself an illusion) hemming and hawing with mock-profundity about what we are going to do, as though we were making decisions, rather than merely waiting to do what we must do. We must either flow with the wave in which we inevitably find ourselves, or struggle to remain standing and resistant against its force. But the feeling that we have a choice in the matter is a folly. Most will do the former, and all the fear and vanity they waste on rationalizing their passivity is merely their earthly punishment. A few will do the latter, and all the hubris and indignation with which they prod and provoke themselves to do what they were going to do anyway is their earthly punishment.

As the population of the “advanced” world peaks and begins to recede, we will face an increasing number of deaths among us each year. And as our attachment to the world wide web of delusion descends precipitiously from its hopeful beginnings as accessible connection to its ultimate payoff as inescapable cocoon — from practical freedom to virtual imprisonment — our continuous immersion in the materially rising tide of death will send most of humanity ever deeper into the catatonic world of infantile fantasy and willing surrender to the nihilistic determinism of mindless pleasure and murderous comfort. Socrates is the only rational answer, and Socrates — the personal gadfly stirring you from your sleep of convenient unreason and sheepish self-certainty — is the most inaccessible voice of all in a world of “global communication” and information without knowledge: the voice that speaks to your soul, not your body, and to your private being, not your public persona.