Davis Aurini - How to Cope with Universal Skepticism (Requested Video)

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 17, 2020 - Davis Aurini

22:36

How to Cope with Universal Skepticism (Requested Video)

Originally uploaded January, 2017

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	This requested video comes from Jachin, and it's a question I think that most of us, all of us actually, but only some of us are aware that we're dealing with it.
	It's a very omnipresent question.
	In this age of absolute doubt, what are we supposed to believe in?
	Where are we supposed to find our faith?
	And it comes, the question comes, ironically enough, from Christianity itself.
	Because Christianity started, it started with the premise, with the promise that everything in the world is understandable.
	It is discoverable.
	That we can figure out how the world works.
	You know, like if you've done any, I know I use the auto mechanics metaphor quite a bit, but this is one of the things I find.
	Because when I go in to fix my car, when my car's broken and I have to fix it, well, it's a very depressing feeling.
	It's while the car is being fixed, you don't have transportation.
	You know, it almost feels like the universe could potentially come to an end if you can't fix the car.
	And when you go to fix it, you don't know exactly what the problem is.
	You might have a really good guess.
	You might have some thoughts as to what you could do, but you don't know how to fix the problem.
	And so this is anytime I approach it, I know, though, that despite this, as much as it worries me, on a deep level, I know I can fix it.
	It's going to be painful.
	I'm going to bleed.
	I don't really want to do it.
	It's going to be mentally difficult as well as physically difficult.
	But I know that I can fix it.
	And there is a moment of doubt in the process, but thus far, I have yet to be proven wrong.
	And so this confidence that Christendom had, that the physical world was comprehensible, that we could figure it out, that we could, you know, make, that we could develop the scientific method.
	Ironically enough, this is what taught us to doubt.
	Because this competence that we can figure out the world makes us doubt our current understanding of it, our current theory of how the world works.
	And so rather than the old pagan faiths, which said this is how the world works, just believe in it, go die for your country, that's just learning a theory.
	With Christianity, with the Western civilization, it became about learning to formulate theories, which means doubting your current theory.
	And so this universal era of doubt, you know, this is what Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were writing about.
	They predicted the 20th century quite accurately.
	Ironically enough, this is a product of Christendom, a result of that faith that we could find the answers.
	And now the interesting thing about the present day is that the vast majority of people, certainly the more pig-headed Christians, but especially the atheists, they no longer know how to formulate theories.
	They just memorize theories.
	You know, it used to be, again, in this medieval setting, that we would memorize facts, grammar.
	We would memorize historical events, dates, but theories we were constantly generating.
	We learned how to build theories.
	Whereas now we ignore facts because we can Google them.
	We could just pull out our smartphone and Google any fact we need.
	Instead, we memorize theories without understanding how to generate theories, where they come from.
	And so in a funny sense, this existential dread, this existential doubt that I think a lot of us feel is largely absent from the atheist.
	And yet the atheist lifestyle, it does, it does tend towards misery, doesn't it?
	Because we're talking about suffering.
	And you might be able to tell, I've been listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson to help try and formulate the answer to this question.
	The question is suffering.
	How do we deal with the issue of suffering?
	Now, on the one hand, you get the Christians, and this was Nietzsche's critique, the Christians that use religion as a way to forestall fear of death, fear of failure, fear of suffering.
	And you still see this.
	It's actually very strong in America amongst Christianity there.
	The pre-rapture, the doctrine of prosperity, these are all ways the people that follow this, they convince themselves of some tenet, some set of beliefs, so that they don't have to address the problem of their own suffering.
	Now, I think I might actually go into this a bit more in depth in another video, discussing heresies and why they're heresies and what sort of damage they do.
	But they latch onto these beliefs and constantly reaffirm these beliefs because it saves them from having to deal with darkness, with chaos, with danger.
	And yet these beliefs become very fragile in the process.
	And so if they experience any trauma, any suffering, it threatens to completely destroy their faith.
	Because it was never faith to begin with.
	It's just belief in an axiom, belief in a theory.
	If I am righteous, then I will become rich and I will never suffer.
	And then your child dies in a car accident.
	What do you do then?
	Now the atheists, meanwhile, they try and boil down suffering to a question of utilitarianism, of utility.
	How do we reduce suffering in the world?
	But see, what happens when we do that?
	What happens when we completely eliminate suffering?
	Think of the trust fund kid.
	Okay, everything's paid for.
	All right, gets to eat the best food in the world.
	It gets to have all the sex they want, gets to do whatever.
	What do they immediately go and do?
	Yourself.
	Think about yourself.
	What would you do?
	Now, if you were if you included the fact that you have this desire, and you recognize this desire, and you're reaching for faith, even though we doubt so much, you'd pursue virtue.
	You discipline yourself, you'd maybe become an author, a musician, or a bodybuilder, or something.
	You would pursue some form of excellence that required suffering to achieve.
	You'd play the guitar until your fingers bled.
	Or you reject it and you'd seek destruction.
	Because even in that lap of luxury, even when you have so much, you have everything you want, now what?
	Think of the spiritual hangover that you get if you spend several days playing video games or going on an alcohol bender.
	You know, you do it, but you're not satisfied.
	You get frustrated.
	You get angry.
	And if you keep seeking out a sense of pleasure in the real world, if that's your definition of virtue, is seeking out that source of pleasure.
	It doesn't lead to a good place.
	It actually leads you straight to hell.
	Because pleasure is unsatisfying.
	we aren't meant to feel happy all the time another thought experiment If you say to somebody, what if I installed a microchip in your brain that gives you the feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment?
	Would you click that button to have that feeling?
	And, you know, most people would say no.
	And then the question is, then, what do you want?
	And see, that's what the video games are.
	You know, it gives you the sense of artificial accomplishment, and it doesn't make us happy.
	You know, that's what all of this meaningless sex is.
	And it doesn't make us happy.
	That's what drugs are.
	And you just need to look at drug addicts.
	You know, this is the thing that really terrifies me about the opiate addiction.
	Because it's massive right now.
	There are so many people taking opiates.
	You know, they've got radio commercials saying that, oh, be careful, your kids are going to steal your opiates.
	Because you got them on a prescription, so it's okay, but your kids are going to steal your opiates.
	Well, just because you got them on prescription doesn't mean they're good for you.
	And you know, I see these people that are on opiates.
	I've had far too many encounters with them.
	And these people, they become progressively more dissociated from reality.
	Okay, you can tell that they're on opiates because of how unpredictable they are.
	When you try and speak to them, when you watch them move, there isn't this consistency.
	There isn't a predictable pattern.
	And they're generally pretty calm.
	They're not violent.
	But the unpredictability of them means that they could potentially be very violent for no particular reason.
	And that there's no way, if they become angry, if they become violent, there's nothing you can do that will necessarily work to calm them down.
	Because they don't know what, because they're not angry.
	They're not going to be getting angry at you because, hey, hey, why are you smoking in my house?
	At which point you say, oh, I'm sorry, and you stop smoking.
	No, they're going to be getting angry at you because they are unsatisfied by the opiates.
	The opiates have given them everything they think they want, and they are not satisfied.
	They have no catharsis, no meaning.
	And the opiates are really just, this is just the path we've been on for so long.
	Because we've been trying to construct our own realities, our own systems of meaning.
	And they're not providing us meaning.
	And so people devolve into extreme sexual perversion.
	They devolve into extreme politics, trying to find meaning through the political process.
	They try and find meaning from their sex or their race.
	Or alternatively, they try and destroy their sex and their race.
	The feminists that absolutely hate femininity, they're trying to find meaning by destroying that.
	The same thing with the popularity of transsexualism and the ethnomasochism that we see.
	Just desperately trying to find this meaning in something constructed by men, in our own self-made theories.
	Because of this omnipresence of doubt.
	Because we've learned how to make theories, which makes us question the very theory that taught us how to make theories in the first place.
	It's really, it's a catch-22 that we found ourselves in.
	And really, this catch-22, this is the nature of men all the way back throughout time.
	The present iteration of it is that faith in God taught us to doubt God, taught us to be able to think beyond a world with God, to think all these different possible worlds, and it's led us to nothing.
	Alleviation of suffering does not alleviate our suffering.
	So what the hell are we supposed to do about that?
	Those that really pursue virtue, or pursue hedonism, whether it's intellectual or drug-based, as I said, they come to resentment.
	They become angry.
	become destructive of themselves and of the world around them
	It becomes particularly bad when this drug addiction, or this vice that you are pursuing, harms somebody else, you know, when your drug addiction harms your child or a loved one, or your ideology forces you away from your parents, and so what?
	What do you do then?
	What do you do?
	You've been pursuing hedonism to alleviate suffering, and your pursuit of hedonism has increased suffering.
	So what the hell do you do then, except double down and focus on creating more suffering.
	Hurt as many people as you can, including yourself.
	Hurt yourself to hurt other people.
	And you know, you've seen this.
	I've seen this.
	We don't want to become that, because there's there's never a just or correct target is there when we're angry, when we're frustrated.
	There's never somebody that we can take it out on directly who deserves it.
	You know, maybe we can delude ourselves into thinking they deserve it, but there's always going to be collateral damage, and this is the fundamental nature of man, is that we.
	We know that we suffer, but we can't explain why that we suffer.
	And even alleviating that suffering does not make us happy.
	You know, this is the price of eating that apple.
	In one sense we are like deities, that we can construct our own reality, our own theories, but the only way we can make them true is by force.
	You know somebody pointed this out to me recently now the the words dialogue and diabolic dialogue, from the Greek, through the locus, the Logos, through the word diabolic bolos, through being thrown.
	And so when we try and make ourselves, when we try and achieve that deific quality, when we come up with our theory of perfection, our utopian reality, the only way to make it a reality is through throwing it at other people, is to become diabolic and to force others to accept our utopia, our definition, our theory of utopia.
	Dialogue requires the logos, it requires that faith in the ability to communicate.
	It is only through god that we can speak to one another and have meaningful statements and come to understand reality And try and hurt others less.
	Try and understand the other person.
	Through God, we can see and understand the other person.
	And through that communication, be naked in front of one another.
	Which then impacts you as well.
	When you open up a dialogue with somebody, when you truly open yourself to dialogue, you don't know what's going to come out the other side.
	You don't know what you're going to be on the other side of that.
	You become vulnerable.
	Whereas the diabolic, when you throw your ideology at somebody else, when you force them to accept your theory, you remain separate.
	You remain prideful.
	So what are we supposed to do in this age of endless questions?
	endless doubt i would say that the answer is to open up dialogue with other people is to not get lost in your internal doubts and questions
	but rather to look at the other people around you and through the logos to speak to them and to experience the conversation and to be honest with them and see what happens to you when you are honest with them.
	In a way, you need to accept that doubt.
	You need to accept that it is there and not try and eliminate it with certitude.
	It's when you try and impose that certitude upon yourself and upon the world around you that you become diabolic and you fall into a pit of suffering that has no ladder out.
	But when you engage in dialogue, even if you are suffering, there is a path upwards.
	Stay strong, folks, Deus Bolt.

▲