We Are Not Built To Sit Behind a Computer

And yet, we spend most of our lives feeling too old for whatever it is we are doing

© Pearl Jam (?)

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Orson Welles, The Third Man

I recently realised that I am an iconoclast, but only regarding the icons of others—just like everyone else. It’s not much of a realisation, but rather a rehash of the question: “What are the things we can all agree upon?”

That’s a question that hasn’t been answered satisfactorily, at least not to my satisfaction. I believe we should start by asking: “What were we built for?” Men were meant to gather resources and hunt medium-sized animals. Women were meant to bear children. Can we agree on that, at least as an original principle? And both were meant to die no later than age 25 when our bodies start to inevitably decay (though that’s already contentious).

Sometime between the invention of the washing machine and the popularisation of the Internet, we might have achieved a healthy balance between natural and manufactured life.

Then, we got hooked up into the ‘matrix’. We became sedentary, slow, and complacent. Lethargic. We outsourced our science, dumbed down our philosophy, and forgot our religion. Like Chronos, we started to have too much to live for, to the point where we now contemplate consuming our offspring to sustain our existence.

Much of our lives are spent being too old for what we are doing. My great-grandfather used to catch bulls by the horns with his bare hands while dressed like a gentleman. In contrast, I sit in the air conditioning, sipping coffee in my pyjamas. This can’t work out in the long term.

To me, that’s the greatest and most inextricable paradox between evolution and creation. We cannot be built as the most perfect machines we know to exist only to devolve into lesser machines. It flies in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. But that’s what we appear to be doing.

This is quite evident: our arts are regressing, our philosophy is regressing, and so is our ability to have honest conversations. It appears that mankind has reached its peak. Yet, we continue to expand our footprint in some way or another.

Is it possible that the best version of ourselves is the one that sits behind a computer all day, not spending enough time teaching children, nor building for the long term, but binge-watching Netflix? Maybe it is. The survival of the fittest doesn’t necessarily mean the survival of the best. What if the best version of myself is also the most misfit? The survival of the misfittest.

Our civilisation had a difficult puberty. Perhaps it is still having it. Or it is going straight from puberty into menopause, which makes sense when you look at our declining birth rates.

There’s No Need To Be a Hero

You spend your life with next to no purpose but an inner desire, hoping for a tragedy to occur so you can play the hero. This would allow you, in an unprecedented way, to take revenge on things that might have never happened. It was always you battling your internal Rumpelstiltskin, who keeps ordering you to prepare the tastiest rabbit stew in the world. But when you fail, you face only mild consequences.

In the midst of all this, Günther Grass calls (from beyond) to warn you about presenting yourself as the moral reserve of the community when you are an immoral and lying homunculus. You will resign to this type of life because it is the ‘lesser of evils.’ But the problem is that the ‘lesser of evils’ sometimes grows… and it can grow a lot.

Your life hinges on the small changes you make in your behaviour to adapt to a morally bankrupt world. You are living in the world of The Lives of Others. Our lives take place in East Berlin in the 80s.

‘The Sorrows of a Young Conformist’ is a Thin Book, Easy to Read

As someone who opens a can of sardines and is surprised to find sardines inside, one feels a sad embarrassment for their lack of moral fibre and makes sure to remember that they suffer from acute imbecility, not chronic. A mix of Sisyphus with a dung beetle. A conformist.

The problem is that people stopped confessing in the church to go confess at the pharmacy. “Take a Valium and three Ambiens and go in peace, my son,” the new-age priests say. But what is controversial is that some progressive scholars want them to add, “this penance was sponsored by Pfizer” at the end.

It’s the same playbook: the guy comes with his head down, talking quietly, and asks the pharmacist for his black box meds, carrying the guilt of a pious, lapsed Catholic.

“Either we all profit or morality shall be restored,” they think. And then you hear in the distance the music of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, puzzled to see that it is the adults who follow him these days.

In the Middle Ages, the conformist would be afraid to even let the milk spoil to make cheese. “Is it hygienic?”

What’s a Conformist?

Just as the FDA tolerates a tiny amount of pieces of insects in a chocolate bar, the conformist used to view moral corruption as something inevitable, but that must be minimised. Today, they see it as an excuse to stuff a cockroach down our throats.

No one joins a cult; they only join a group of cool people who think alike. Except for the conformist, who joins a cult, even knowing it is a cult. And he’s doing everything to force us to join too. For our own good. In fairness, he knows all honest cults must proselytize.

The conformist is that guy who, when you ask for information on the street, gives you the information even though he has no idea what he’s doing. Because he just wants to help. What scares me about the conformist is that he is the kind of guy who suddenly has a meltdown and reveals himself to be a psychopath. “Then he becomes a serial killer?” No, then he endorses lockdowns and includes his preferred pronouns in his LinkedIn profile.

He is a guy who wanted to be mayor but became a traffic cop, exercising that fragile authority. That authority lasts until the first “So, what are you going to do?” Nothing. The conformist is the guy who gets the order wrong at the restaurant and doesn’t say anything. (Neither do I. I think complaining is a bit déclassé.)

In past lives, he was a Viking. But he was a conformist Viking. He was in charge of household tasks and never went out to pillage and loot, like his more assertive friends. He even denied such activities were taking place.

The conformist, in itself, is a phenomenon that only exists when there is someone around. At least in nature. A test-tube conformist is a different animal.

The conformist is the guy who goes to a lecture and spends 40 minutes thinking of a question. When he finally musters up the courage, the question is completely pointless. And everyone already wanted to leave. He survived the Titanic just to drown in the bathtub.

But look around you, and you must admit: for a person with little aspirations, the conformist made quite a mess.

The Hammer, the Nail, and the Thumb in the Wrong Place

The conformist is the guy who accepted the Trojan Horse, even knowing what was inside. Because he wanted a little of that Athenian democracy, where politicians were princes and most people were slaves. In his emotional memory, it was easier to be a servant than to be free.

And he might be right. Because the road to serfdom is paved with free stuff. And the road to freedom is not free.

‘Athenian’ was a poetic license. Our freedom of expression, in itself, has become a small collection of poetic licenses. Thanks to the conformists.

Maybe the problem is democracy in and of itself. In the absence of common values. As we know, the conformist is above all a ‘democrat’. If the majority votes for him to jump into the abyss, he jumps. Oh, he jumps. Because we all agreed to that.

And the conformist learned that democratic rights are not exercised just any old way. There is a very specific way to exercise them. Any deviation from their preconceived guard rails triggers a paranoia of “saving democracy at all costs.”

And the problem with “at all costs” is exactly what you’re thinking.

In a heated debate about conformists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes agreed: that man is not born good or bad, he is born stupid. Anything else is simply impossible.

Between the bad manners of others and his righteous corruption, the conformist offers moral lessons to the world without ever looking at who’s talking. Trying to resist the temptation to use that last thread of hope to mend the seat of his pants.

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Quick note: This is a repost with a few updates, as I’m away for a couple of weeks on holiday. Thank you for reading!

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