mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu

A rant about human hubris

So earlier today, at work, I was talking about how I'd like to have the most recent Covid vaccination but, you know, making appointments and such. I turned up at the pharmacy a few Saturdays back, she said to phone later. I, of course, did not. I detest phoning. It's enough of a challenge to catch the out-of-band communication cues when you're right in front of somebody, but the phone? The ADHD part of me is more than happy to procrastinate this for ever. In fact, that's more or less my entire attitude towards phoning people for specific reasons. It's much better when it's just to talk about random stuff as, well, my mind is nothing but randomness.

The woman I was talking to was like "Oh no, don't do that, it's poison". Now, I can get that. There's some really weird stuff in vaccinations, and the entire point is to make you a tiny bit ill in a very specific way because, well, there's no other way to teach the immune system about things. It's not like we can download viral recognition kits from the cloud (and if we could, would you be dumb enough to trust them?).
But then she continued. She said "They're tracking you". It took a while for me to work out that something sounding like "djho zorro" was a Frenchie trying to say "George Soros". Yes, if I get myself vaccinated, then George Soros will be able to track me.
She probably had opinions on 5G, but I decided I had better things to do than risk getting fired for lamping the dumbf██k.

Funny, we couldn't get Bluetooth to work reliably for interpersonal tracking during the pandemic, plus it slaughtered battery life, and we keep adding different bands to WiFi in order to try to give our hardware a sporting chance at not having crappy download speeds because everybody else is using their WiFi, and yet George Soros (I think Bill Gates turns up in this story somewhere) is able to make an actual transmitter small enough to not only be squirted via an injection, but is not visible to the naked eye, has no antenna nor power source, yet magically just works. Because George Soros is a f██king god.

Trust me, if George Soros was responsible for even a fraction of the shit that George Soros gets blamed for, he would be a f██king god.
Instead, he's an old bloke with droopy eyes. Came from Hungary, went to the US, made an absolute f██kton of money. And, yet, for some reason the far right absolutely detest him and make up loads of idiotic conspiracy theories that some delusional halfwit in France reads, and believes.
But why? Because he's of foreign origin and he is loaded? Elon Musk, anybody? Yet Musk seems to be the darling of the right and pretty cosy with the Florida Man.
Or maybe it's just because Soros isn't a wanker. He does philanthropy and, I guess, the far right just can't conceive of somebody making a massive pile of money and using some of it to help the less fortunate. Which, given that Bill Gates is also a philanthropist and is also in these dumb conspiracies, would make a lot of sense.

 

But really we need to step back and see this from further away . From much further away, as I was going over this in my mind while at work and I have reached a conclusion that explains religion, George Soros tracking us, and why seemingly sane people are turning their backs on science and saying crap like the Earth is flat.

 

One word: Hubris.

 

Everybody has this innate desire to be something special. Well, almost everybody. I'm not interested. But people these days often seem to think "celebrity" and "influencer" are real and worthy jobs. Because "look at me", plus mugging to a camera as you sell yourself out to whatever corporate sponsor is a lot easier than actual jobs that actually require actual f██king work.

But it goes back waaay beyond that. There was a time, not actually that long ago, that people thought the Earth was the centre of everything and everything revolved around the Earth. It wasn't until glass had been invented, the behaviour of lenses had been discovered, and somebody had the bright idea to put some lenses together to make stupidly far away things visible...that somebody had the genius idea of pointing the tube up into the night sky to look at what those little pricks of light actually were. And, SHOCK! HORROR! one of those dots was Jupiter, which has moons. Loads of moons, but most people using things smaller than, say, an eight inch Dobson, will only be able to see the big four. But how many moons can be seen is not relevant. What is relevant is that they can clearly be seen orbiting a different celestial body. Which means, track the things that aren't stars and may be other worlds like Earth, and SURPRISE!, they and Earth are orbiting the Sun. Of course back then that sort of thing was considered heresy because...

Man is made in God's image. Says so right in the bible. As it's in Genesis, there is probably equivalent wording in the Koran and the Talmud because I think Islam and Christianity plagarised the story from Judaism and added their own tweaks (like The New Testament for Christians), and the Jews? They probably rearranged some old Canaanite stories who nicked them from the Phonetians and so on, each time the story getting a little more corrupted to suit the whims of whoever was telling it.

But, alas, it's not even that simple. Islam has three sects (Shi'ite, Sunni, and the other one I can't be bothered to Google the name of) and they really don't get on with each other. Christianity split up into three primary branches as well - the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and the rabble that is Protestantism. I say rabble because can you name all of the divisions and subdivisions? Church of England (because Henry The Eighth I am I am), Baptist, Methodist, Anabaptist, Lutheran, Evangelical, and loads more (over a hundred in the US alone). Then there are the ones that the Christian-like such as Mormon (it's to do with the concept of continued revelation as described in the Book of Mormon).
And that's only the Abrahamic religions. There are plenty of others (Hindu, Sihk, Shinto, Buddhist, indigenous beliefs, Wicca, Paganism, and... yes... even that dumb cult that all the American actors that have more money than braincells are a part of). By plenty of others, I mean hundreds upon hundreds. And what most of them have in common, asides from often proscribing arcane rules that must be followed and purporting to give a reason as to why everything exists, is the concept that "you are special". That God/Allah/the flying spaghetti monster loves you.

Let's just take a quick detour and ask why, if God loves you and is going to "save" you, did he see fit to drop you into this shitshow that you would need to be saved from? Is it supposed to be a test? Can you trust a god that tests you in such a way? What if you fail and don't pray hard enough, sin too much, or just don't believe? Do you not get saved then? Because that's not love. That's just narcisistic megalomania, a very human trait. Not because humans are made in God's image but quite the reverse.

And even bigger detour: Sorry, I can't think about god saving me without wondering what format that would be. I hope there is suitable redundancy and built-in error correction.

Now, where were we? Oh yes... Science has given us many things. One of the things is the majesty and scale of the universe. We now know, thanks to science, that we are utterly alone. Sure, there may be basic life on Europa or in some other part of our Solar System, but there's no other intelligent life in the sense that we are. There is likely to be other intelligent life in the universe, but, really, if it is as far away from the Andromeda galaxy as that is from us (that's usually the furthest thing (just) visible with the naked eye, at 2.5 million lightyears) then it's a pretty safe bet that we would never know. Our species isn't that old, and unlike the dinosaurs, we probably won't last long enough to get a signal to Andromeda, never mind beyond, nor get a message back.

Which means, we are utterly alone, sitting on this rock whizzing around a minor star somewhere out on the arm of a galaxy. In other words, not only is the universe not revolving around the Earth, our actual place is "meh, unimportant".

This, I think, is why people are rejecting science in preference of fantasies. It's because those fantasies make people feel special, while science makes us seem so very meaningless. The problem is, fantasies are just an illusion. A great big security blanket for the emotionally weak.

Here's the truth. It's very simple:

No, you don't talk to Jesus/God/Uriel/whoever, because you aren't f██king special.

No, you will not be "saved", because you aren't f██king special.

Unless you owe money, committed a crime, or got some chick pregnant, chances are that nobody is tracking you because you aren't f██king special (except the crazy cat lady down the road, she knows all about you and what you get up to).

George Soros doesn't give a f██k about you, guess why.

And, finally, for the vast majority who want to be "influencers", you aren't f██king special.

 

Here it is, then. The world is round. You aren't special. Neither am I. There's no supreme being orchestrating from the shadows, just a lot of charlatans trying to hoodwink you.

You want to be special? You don't need gods. You don't need science either. You are alive. You are reading this. You will have some sort of thought about what you have read, that you might care to share below. Because you can see and feel and taste and think, walk and talk and breathe and kick a ball and catch a thrown Malteser and write a short story that you came up with all by yourself. And, most of all, you can love. And all of those other emotions too.
That's pretty f██king special, and that's why you are pretty f██king special, and if you can't see that then you really need to open your eyes and your mind.

 

 

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺ ADDING COMMENTS DOES NOT WORK IF READING TRANSLATED VERSIONS.
 
You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.

Gavin Wraith, 26th November 2024, 01:06
I am sorry to say that Google still has nothing to say about the True Faith, as promulgated by the Funambulous Evangels. These, believing the surface of the earth to be covered by the dust of our departed ancestors, refrain from placing their feet upon it, and out of respect, they walk aloft on ropes or upon specially consecrated footgear, which may be purchased - naturally at a considerable price - from their priests. 
 
[The Eyes of the Overworld, Jack Vance]
Bernard, 28th November 2024, 19:46
The Age of Nonsense:  
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/24/not-quite-religion-not-quite-self-help-welcome-to-the-jordan-peterson-age-of-nonsense
Bernard, 28th November 2024, 19:51
I don't believe it. Another interpolated space. Please just delete the offending character!
Rick, 28th November 2024, 20:24
Bernard: It's not you, it's the blog. The space was added to things that were long, I think, to work around a formatting issue in either a really old NetSurf or Fresco. Neither are really relevant these days, so... probably ought to get around to making the code not do that any more.

Add a comment (v0.11) [help?] . . . try the comment feed!
Your name
Your email (optional)
Validation Are you real? Please type 14178 backwards.
Your comment
French flagSpanish flagJapanese flag
Calendar
«   November 2024   »
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
    3
47810
121415
1819212224
262729 

(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)

Last 5 entries

List all b.log entries

Return to the site index

Geekery
 
Alphabetical:

Search

Search Rick's b.log!

PS: Don't try to be clever.
It's a simple substring match.

Etc...

Last read at 09:11 on 2024/12/03.

QR code


Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional
Valid CSS
Valid RSS 2.0

 

© 2024 Rick Murray
This web page is licenced for your personal, private, non-commercial use only. No automated processing by advertising systems is permitted.
RIPA notice: No consent is given for interception of page transmission.

 

Have you noticed the watermarks on pictures?
Next entry - 2024/11/28
Return to top of page