Humanism

Donald Trump, consumerism, police shootings, obesity, Tinder, Millennials, and the 1%. Anyone feel like once we threw shame and religion to the wind, our collective fatalism decided that since they were no longer the cardinal sins, they should instead become our primary way of life? I'm not a religious person, but I feel like our resulting collective existential crisis has made us shun the civilizing forces of self-denial and virtuousness in favor of fatalistic solipsism and indulgent narcissism. "YOLO" culture is a a romantic rejection of cynicism and incentives selfish, short-term gains and indulgent deviance instead of long-term growth and restrained resource investment. "Don't live in the past, don't fixate on your future, you must exist in the present. Could you die happy tomorrow if you don't do this today?" The misconception being that there is a significant chance you have a statically relevant chance of dying. The loss of dogmatic religion and folkways has lead to a power vacuum. Science can't fill the void because science is the realm of objective reality, not philosophy, and the answers to the most fundamental philosophical questions cannot be found in the physical world. NDGT and the modern-day transcendentalists can only offer an alternative to spirituality, not answers. Finding meaning in the face of your own insignificance is more challenging than ever. We are more and more socially isolated and have lost sight of the tremendous power and importance of a single drop in a bucket holds. We don't know what we're a part of anymore. The Great Human Experience needs a Messiah. Prophets like Elon Musk and Carl Sagan have their gospel of Humanity's fundamental directive lost in the buzz of the "Present." We need to lengthen our view. News needs to be less imminent. We need to explain not only what is happening in the present, but how new occurrences are contributing or detracting from our greater mission and by how much. Imagine a news cast where someone read "4,200 people died in Iraq today. 3,700 were born. 430 of those were caused by preventable means, 18 as a result of today's roadside bomb. To date, the war had been proven to be the single most impactful factor in Iraq's flagging National Health score, currently at 51/100." How much more informative would that be? Context to the impact of the information. A focus on the greater picture, a reason to care. We need to focus on our historic mission. The Prime Directive, as gleaned from all life: to battle nature. To continue to grow and expand. To preserve Humanity and our ecosystem. To generate seeds, scatter to the wind, and be reborn in new soil. To procreate. To self-replicate. To evolve faster and faster. For each generation to be born stronger than the last. To use the tool of consciousness to incrementally better ourselves. To increase the quality of the gene pool and the meme pool. The analogy of humans as an infection is not inaccurate, if often used derogatorily. We need to spread. The Earth will only remain ripe for so long before it begins to rot. We must prevent the rotting by evolving, both bodily and memetically, to live in symbiosis with our food source. We must learn from our gut biome. Just as the e. Coli bacteria in your stomach helps you live, the Human Bacteria, powered by metal and coal instead of protein and sugar, must ensure the survival of our planetary gut. And, we need to spread to our next host. Mars looks like it might be fertile and rehabilitated such that we may bring it to fruition. So does Venus, looking pleasantly plump for ripening. We must move to these new guts and begin digesting. Evolving into new organisms to adapt to this new environment. This is our mission. This is what it means to be Human. This is why we exist. To impose structure on chaos. Agents fighting for order against entropy. To maintain homeostasis. Civility and virtue in the face of Nature's march toward entropy and anarchy.