An argument for pessimism for eternity

Last Updated on June 18, 2023

Intro

In this post, I try to put my thoughts down in favor of pessimism in life. Listing facts and figures and building arguments from them, I try to showcase how deep pessimistic ideas run and are inextricably entrenched across the systems be it political, economic, ecological, biological, and physical world/cosmos.

Word of Caution: This comes with no surprise. If you are looking to find some hope or want to keep it safe, you may well do that if you skip this post. It only gets darker going from one section to the next. So, have fun losing hope!

Biological: Memento Mori – Everyone dies

The Greeks had a separate term to remind us that our time on earth is limited. By the way, Why do people even say “time on earth” as if they have also got time somewhere else? Maybe, this is why Elon Musk wants to spend some time on Mars too.

Many religions say that once you leave earth you will go to either heaven or hell or take birth again on earth. I wish those places were real. At least, people would be afraid of hell and not willingly commit crimes.

I have already seen the earth. I wonder how bad the hell can get. When you know you can only feel pain in your body and not in your soul, how can the hell be worse? It is like you are being tortured when you are on anesthesia or pain killer.

What if you are a masochist? How is hell going to work for you? Will it be heaven? And, can heaven get hell for masochists?

For the people who don’t know what Masochism is: a person who is gratified by pain, degradation, etc., that is self-imposed or imposed by others.

What if you are not a masochist at the beginning when you were sent to hell? But, slowly you learn to live with the pain and suffering. And, after some time, you even start to enjoy some pain. Eventually, becoming a full-fledged masochist. Then, are masochists kicked out of hell because they turned hell into heaven for them?

What if you are a masochist but you fake you are not one so you can get into hell? It’s a win-win for both hell administrators and the masochist as long as you keep your mouth.

Once your time is done, If you are not getting into heaven but into hell and not masochist, then life after death might not be very exciting. Of course, this is true only when heaven and hell are real places and they are still operational.

If you don’t believe in any of these, you exist only in the time frame – from birth to death. It is up to each one of us how we live in this time frame. The concept of we ceases to exist beyond this time frame losing all its value.

You might say your legacy can still survive and thrive even after your death. But, that is your legacy and not “you”.

Some people don’t care about their legacy at all because life is too short for that. This kind of thinking might be coming from a narrow self-interest mindset.

What if you care about what kind of world you going to leave behind?

So, if you are living for progeny, next-generation or making the world a better place, the systems are just as important as the next generation for them to live in. Let’s look into each of the main systems where one has to live – Political, Economic, Ecological, and Physical.

Political

Here we can look at politics in two ways – Corrupting Democracy and Democracy not being a meritocracy.

Corrupting Democracy

We are no strangers to spam bots and fake accounts on social media. They flood the platform with their own material to push their agenda. This phenomenon has become so common now that every political party has an IT Cell of its own. There are also independent third-party agencies providing these services to individuals and organizations.

The real issues don’t matter if they are severe or not and are easily suppressed and silenced on social media. This has hijacked the public discourse and has left society unconscious over the real issues. And, Where do mainstream news media get their topics for discussion? trending hashtags which are made popular by the IT cells.

It is as if society is suffering from issues and nobody wants to talk about it. When no one is talking about these issues, if you open your mouth, you will be seen as a weirdo. Only when it becomes severe and the public is enraged about it, then it gets the attention of mainstream media. This makes politicians take just enough action to show the media their response to the crisis couldn’t have been better.

On one hand, social media might be leading to the slow decay of Democracy. On the other hand, there are age-old narratives that demoralize anyone who wants to study and address societal problems.

Following is the typical narrative found in the discouraging answers given by elders or others for anyone showing any interest in addressing issues in society.

“It is hard as it is – taking care of ourselves and solving our problem. We cannot get into thinking about solving societal problems. Who asked you to solve all these societal issues? Who asked you to make them your own? It is not your problem. You are not a Baba/Yogi/Swamiji. You are not going to change society by yourself. Just forget about it and focus on your career growth.”

It also severely demotivates people who want to actively participate in democracy. Not just in the bare minimum paying taxes and casting votes, but also getting involved in public discourse, social work, following up public work, activism, etc. When there are people with attitudes like this, society always appears as an abandoned orphan with no guardians to take care of. This leads one to think about whether we even have a true democracy.

Somehow paying taxes has become a bad thing. If contributing to society is so good? then why do people go to such lengths to avoid taxes? Society in general has earned a bad rap. Not in the open but just an inch underneath that superficial happy veneer, everyone is disappointed with their society.

Couple of developments in the United States is worth noting here. The country which is known for upholding democratic values or at the very least, looked up to by other countries is itself suffering from democratc decline. January 6 United States Capitol attack is the kind of incident you would expect to see only in countries with immature democracy, or a country that is taken over by apes.

Another event that has far bigger consequences than the Capitol attack is the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This truly blows my mind. Are we living in the middle ages or what? In the rest of the major democratic countries in the world, it is not even an issue. The US needs to get it together. If it goes on this path, it would no longer have the moral authority to preach human rights to the rest of the world.

Democracy not being meritocratic

I don’t dispute the idea that democracy can be meritocratic. But, factually speaking, it is far from being meritocratic.

When I say meritocratic I don’t mean to say that people should clear a test before contesting elections. To me, meritocratic in a democracy means people analyze and evaluate extensively the candidates before even they elect them. If this happens, only people with merits will be elected.

Now, in India, No one can dismiss the fact that our largest Democracy in the world is meritocratic. It is meritocratic in the sense that the only merits you need to have are cash, caste and in some cases, even criminal background.

Cash

Election Commission has placed a limit on how much one can spend for their election campaign. This has been less than 1 crore. In fact, in the month of January 2022, when EC raised the limits for the Lokasabha election campaign from 70 lakhs to 95 lakh rupees in bigger states and 54 lakhs to 75 lakhs in smaller states.

According to the affidavits filed by the candidates after the 2009 elections, 99.58 percent said they had spent between 45 and 55 percent of the limit.

If every candidate is claiming to spend well below the limit, then they are happy with the limit. aren’t they? What is the need to raise the limit?
This is like you have a couple of rooms in your house you are not using and yet, you go on to rent another flat on top of yours. The logic of this statement cannot be found in this universe. No wonder, even the former chief election commissioner said the limit should be decreased.

I think, when asked, more people would be honest about their age than politicians about their campaign expenditures….

This is why Atal Bihari Vajpayee rightly said:

“Indian politicians start their legislative careers with a lie — the false spending returns they submit? – Atal Bihari Vajpayee”

The cash-merit is not over yet. So far, what you read about cash is only about the campaign expenditure limit on candidates.

But, there is no limit on how much a party can spend. This is not it.

In 2017, these politicians passed a bill so that they get to raise campaign funds through “electoral bonds” anonymously. This means that in the name of keeping the donor “anonymous”, they can raise the funds from shell companies and foreign entities/companies to fund (with no cap limits) and influence Indian elections. These are not my words. This is by Election Commission expressing its opposition to electoral bonds.

You might ask the question – why are they so hungry for cash? and why is it never enough for them? The answer lies in Astroturfing.

Caste

Ugh, I haven’t even gone to another merit of politicians yet – caste. And, you can already guess how messed up the system is.

Caste equations are not as simple as what we saw with cash. It varies based on the party – national or local, region or state, and politicians with different levels of popularity in their community. But, it almost always comes down to taking the dominant caste into confidence to get their votes. These dominant castes usually serve a political party or sometimes a leader by becoming a “vote bank”.

Just weeks before the election, former Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar and Deputy Chief Minister Laxman Savadi quit BJP after being denied a ticket and joined Congress. They were obviously one of the tallest leaders of the Lingayat community after Yeddyurappa.

So, the whole Karnataka election became about one community – Lingayat, at least for weeks. Will their vote divide this time? if divides will Congress sweep Mumbai Karnataka?

Political parties have to always balance the caste equation. In the name of Social Justice, they say they have to give tickets to a person from every community to represent them. They end up giving the lion’s share of tickets to dominant communities.

Vokkaliga and Lingayat are the two most dominant communities in Karnataka. Though the Muslim population is also closer to Lingayat’s if not greater, their votes have never been decisive except in a few constituencies. In addition to that, Vokkaliga and Lingayat communities hold more political, social, and economic clout than any other community in Karnataka. This is why some even say the Karnataka election has always been about Vokkaligas and Lingayats.

Their influence over the election is so huge that the numbers expressing the caste break-up of tickets themselves speak louder than any words could. BJP had given 68 tickets to Lingayats and 42 to Vokkaligas. Congress is no different either. It had issued 51 tickets to Lingayats and 45 tickets to Vokkaligas. JDS follows suit. It gave 55 tickets to Lingayats and 41 tickets to Vokkaligas.

So, every party gave almost 50% of the tickets to these two dominant communities when their population don’t even constitute more than 11% + 14% = 25% of the State’s population. In fact, everyone knows SC is at around 19% and Muslims at 16% so they outnumber Lingayats and Vokkaligas combined.

SCs, STs, Kurubas, and Muslims together form 47.5% of the total population. They do makeup CM Siddaramiah’s AHINDA voting block. Yet, their ticket share is close to half of what Vokkaligas and Lingayats received. Now, Where is Social Justice that every party loves to brag about upholding it?

Criminal Background

Let’s go to another merit they don’t show off as much – Criminal background.

Nearly 50 percent of MPs in Lok Sabha have criminal records. Out of the 539 winners analyzed in the Lok Sabha election 2019, 233 MPs have declared criminal cases against themselves. It is an increase of 44 percent in the number of MPs with declared criminal cases since 2009.

This means having a criminal background is trending up. You know what that means. Interested in getting into electoral politics? Do you feel something missing on you resume?……. Yes, You guessed it right! Criminal History. Coudn’t guess… Don’t be underqualified. Protect your political career. get some criminal experience immediately.

All these qualifications or merits lead to only one conclusion – only privileged people are getting into positions of power. This is not new. Even when democracy all over the world established itself and before the communism or socialism experiment began, Bakunin said about privileged coming to power. This rings true even today. He said that even if learned, well-informed people with privilege once get into positions of power inevitably become corrupt. This is because they abandon the pursuit of truth, seeking instead the protection of their own power.

This might be the reason why Winston Churchill said about Democracy like this:

Winston Churchill once said that: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

As a true politician, Churchill’s remark about democracy is backhanded and tactical in nature. What it meant is Democracy is far from being perfect and there is a lot of room for improvement.

Ultimately the questions that haunt us with the current form of democracy are:

What good is democracy if uninformed people keep electing incompetent self-serving leaders to power? is the uninformed mass to blame for the current system? or informed privileged who kept the mass in ignorance? Why are there no meritocratic checks to become politicians?

Economics

There is a separate post for this section. Please check out – Neo-liberalism: the new plague of the Economic System?

Ecological

We are like the proverbial frog in the boiling water. The only difference is we are the ones who started the boiling and we still continue to do so. That implies we know that, unlike the frog, boiling water – global warming is gonna cook us to death. Yet, we love cooking so much figuratively and literally – causing even more global warming. It is we who keep adding more fuel to the fire by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. So, we cannot get away with it by blaming anyone else. Yet, one country loves to blame another country for it. One country uses another country’s not being able to take stringent measures as an excuse to take very little action. But, no country can claim complete innocence.

Finally, countries all over the world realized that the solution is not going to come from “the free market with an invisible hand” or the Business world. This is because many businesses’ interests simply conflicted with cutting down carbon emissions. Not just that, they didn’t accept that Climate Change is a real thing and is caused by human activities.

In a way, Oil and coal are by far the cheapest source of energy. In business terms, it is only “cost-efficient” to use them and if businesses are about anything, it is efficiency. Their myopic view limited to quarterly results and annual reports is not going to make them look at the bigger picture. So, governments in countries all over the world realized that they have to do something about this existential problem. So, in 2015, they came together and formed an agreement, commonly referred to as Paris Agreement.

Paris Agreement and Carbon Credits

The goal of the Paris Agreement according to Wikipedia is:

The Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal is to keep the rise in mean global temperature to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, and preferably limit the increase to 1.5°C (2.7°F), recognizing that this would substantially reduce the effects of climate change. Emissions should be reduced as soon as possible and reach net-zero by the middle of the 21st century.[3] To stay below 1.5°C of global warming, emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% by 2030. This is an aggregate of each country’s nationally determined contributions.[4]

One of the ways of mitigating the carbon footprint is through Carbon Credit. One credit allows for the emission of one tonne of carbon dioxide or its equivalanet of greenhouse gas. it leads to measurable, verifiable emission reductions. It follows a system called cap-and-trade in which those who pollute are awarded certain credits. If they exceed their limit, they have to pay excess tax on their emissions. If they are able to save some of the credits, they can sell it to others.

But, this is not enforced as mandatory by law in any country as far as I know. There is only a market based on voluntary participation. But, Countries also have something called NDC – Nationally Determined Contributions – the amount of reductions in greenhouse gas(GHGs) emissions that the countries have themselves determined to contribute to the treaty. So, the question is can countries effectively achieve it if they make it voluntary participation to businesses in an industry?

Carbon Offsets: Manmade and Natural

Another popular method to deal with carbon footprints is to get rid of them entirely. While Carbon credits are about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Carbon offsets are about removing greenhouse gas. This is also known as Carbon dioxide removal(CDR).

According to Wikipedia:

CDR methods include afforestation, reforestation, agricultural practices that sequester carbon in soils (carbon farming), wetland restoration and blue carbon approaches, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), ocean fertilization, ocean alkalinity enhancement,[7] and direct air capture when combined with storage,

One couldn’t help but wonder, after reading the list of CDR methods, we have screwed up nature big time. And, these methods are our ways to make up for our sins. We fucked it up like a virus that kills the host and thereby, eventually kills itself. All these things were part of nature to keep nature healthy.

Afforestation and Reforestation

Now, it is sad to know that we need to initiate projects like afforestation and reforestation that nature did it by itself. Squirrels bury nuts in the ground more than they can eat and forget about them later. Birds eating figs and crapping seeds all over the earth even in the remotest islands. Animals especially arboreals like primates eat fruits and spread seeds. Afforestation and Reforestation were part and parcel of the process of nature being nature.

Why didn’t we let birds crap all over the place? Where are the squirrels? and Where are the tree-jumping monkeys?

As of 2023, CDR is estimated to remove around 2 gigatons of CO2 per year,[9] which is equivalent to 4% of the greenhouse gases emitted per year by human activities. There is potential to remove and sequester up to 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year by using those existing CDR methods which can be safely and economically deployed now.

Wikipedia: Carbon Dioxide Removal

Carbon removal is much harder work than Carbon reduction. Yet, nature does it by itself automatically without taking any credit for it. On the other hand, We, humans when we merely reduce, not remove the carbon, we want to take credit for it and we call them – Carbon Credits.

If all these animals knew how to speak our language, they would’ve claimed more credits for the Carbon offsets they are doing, which in fact is more creditworthy as opposed to just reducing the carbon emission.

At some level, we are still in denial or at least, our actions are. European Union is one of the main proponents of green energy and yet, makes free trade agreements whose unintended consequence will be the destruction of one of the largest Carbon Sink in the world – the Amazon forest. This agreement has not come into force yet. However, this is enough to show that our actions are contradictory.

Consumerism and Carbon footprint

Some say that energy efficiency projects such as efficient cookstoves should be part of Carbon Credits. Then, what about people who don’t use cookstoves at all or make very little use of them? Shouldn’t they get Carbon Credits for their Carbon efficient lifestyle?

So, this comes down to the culture of consumerism. We don’t want to accept that problem is in how we live. No, no, no. That would be about our identity. We are simply too proud of ourselves to look at our fault lines.

We know that we can begin to use public transportation, consume less or follow that Ad nauseam phrase Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But, we won’t because there is no incentive for it.

So, I would propose Carbon Credits for consumers so that there is an incentive for them to strive towards that net-zero carbon dioxide emissions.

Anthropocentrism doesn’t explain Climate Crisis

There is this one number that we cannot help ourselves watch it grow. The number we are so obsessed about and desperately involve ourselves in compulsive behavior to see it grow. The number of-course I am talking about is GDP. This might measure the output of an economy, but it doesn’t say anything about how much energy has been consumed in the process.

In the mad rush of producing more, we have lost sight of the amount of fossil fuels we are burning. We don’t care how many trees we cut down for firewood. We don’t mind bringing down the whole ecological system just to please our short-sighted interests.

This has only resulted in entropy rising even further. Now, our system is left with less and less usable energy as we engage ourselves in “growing the economy”. Some say this is because of Anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities (animals, plants, minerals, etc.) are viewed as resources for humans to use.

But, I slightly disagree with the anthropocentric analysis. If Anthropocenticism or humanocentrism or human supremacy is the only thing at work here then would we not care about the future of our generations? are they not humans? So, there is more to it than just Anthropocentrism.

Then, what is it? It is pretty simple. Greed, cloaked in endless economic growth combined with ruthless competition for market share has been depleting all the natural resources.

Physical

2nd Law of Thermodynamics – In an isolated system, entropy can only increase. In other words, energy can only flow in one direction from high-density configuration to low-density. Entropy – A measure of the amount of energy in the physical system that cannot be used to do work.

Once we are done burning cooking gas to heat water, we cannot transfer back the energy from hot water to the cooking gas state. In this example, it is not hard to make out which one is high-density and which one is low-density. This irreversible direction of energy flow is stated by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Entropy: Systems breaking down

We simply have to accept the fact that the direction of energy flow is only one-way or unidirectional. Once we accept that we might come to terms with it.

2nd Law of Thermodynamics can also mean that if the energy doesn’t flow from outside the system, then the system starts breaking down. At least, to maintain the current state of the system, there must be a constant supply of energy from outside. There is no such thing as an entity with self-sufficiency and self-sustainability at this level of the physical world. Everything depends on the system and environment in which it exists to maintain its current state if not to grow.

We can easily see this in living beings as they need to constantly feed themselves to live and grow. But, this also equally applies to non-living things. Can we expect Earth to maintain its current state without being dependent on the sun for its gravitational, light, and heat energy? We can ask the same questions about Sun depending on Galaxy for its energy needs and about Galaxies in the Universe.

We all operate in systems on which we are deeply reliant even if you are home quarantined for months. Just because you are home doesn’t mean your energy needs are not met from the outside.

As the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is the ultimate law that trumps every other law in the energy department, it is the ultimate killer of everything. Everything undoubtedly dies because one day the earth, solar system, and even the universe will run out of energy. This will bring the ultimate climax of everything.