All alone in the night.

[caladri]

The great monster of cosmic terror must be circumstance. Circumstance is worse than fate because it is fate made immediate and manifest, it is utterly inescapable because it rests in the present moment. It isn't enough that there are unimaginable voids into which one can be lost, but the sinking feeling that one might already be within one is the

Comments

[caladri]

It's definitely something that grips people, or it wouldn't be possible to describe even as hamfistedly1 as I did2. Like, it's not all of us humans but a lot of us who find things that pose (direct) existential threats to the whole Earth terrifying, particularly because they may already be happening without our knowing, things like massive bursts of radiation hurtling eventually towards us, or meteors, or what have you.

One has to be sensitive to the feeling of inescape from them, which not everyone is. Some people can shrug it off just as surely as they might assert that for all intents and purposes the moon might as well be a matte painting, and not a massive rock far outside of our control and intricately-linked to our living or dying. And some people think it's cute or clever when people talk about Spaceship Earth or similar imagery, having never grasped the fact that it is real and not abstract or hypothetical.

Our actual circumstance is in living on this fragile little rock, and whether it is terrifying comes down to whether it is realized in experience. What's more, it is inescapable, because we cannot remove ourselves from the position of being drifting in space. If we leave this spaceship, it is only to float aimlessly or to take up another one. There is nowhere to go but little rocks and tin cans, nothing more stable, more fixèd, more true than this thin little strip of existence, precarious and wonderful, and always utterly ungrounded. It is not just all we have known, it is all we can, it is all there is3.

1: Which sounds not a little dirty in context of replying to you.
2: In the most terrifying of all possible worlds, everything would be mind-melting horror.
3: Except for that heavenly cosmos where there is no falling, neither drifting, nor being flung. There there is agency, there is harmony, and not the separateness and the fragility those things all imply.

[twoeleven]

In the most terrifying of all possible worlds, everything would be mind-melting horror.
I think in that world, everything might be mind-melting horror, but you couldn't tell until it is too late to do anything about it.

[caladri]

It would be too late to do anything about it before you were born. But somehow and cruelly your species will still know what hope is, what peace is, and always know they will have none of it.

I mean really, we're all only-slightly maladjusted by the fact that all of us will some day surely die. I have to wonder what people would be used to in the most terrifying of all possible worlds. I'm not sure you can make much of an argument that we don't live in it. Just enough darkness and just enough light to leave room for ever being utterly and horrifically terrified. How many people could spend 10 minutes looking at each of the 93 photos Reuters say are the best of the year? It is a terrible thing to confront even a small portion, even for a short while, even in the comfort of a relatively-safe and -secure home (and such considerable distance besides) the horrors that play out daily upon this planet.

[twoeleven]

Well, I thought Camp 14 was a good documentary because it tried to force people to confront said horrors. :P

[twoeleven]

I'm not sure you can make much of an argument that we don't live in it. Just enough darkness and just enough light to leave room for ever being utterly and horrifically terrified.
Nah, we've had too much progress for me to believe that. We've gotten very good at cheating death, for starters: in most of the world, parents don't routinely worry that their kids will catch some disease and die or worse (e.g. polio). In the civilized world, few women die in childbirth. So, we're pretty good at reducing some of the greatest historical terrors: sudden death of one's child or spouse. Hell, even by historical norms -- by which I mean before the invention of modern police forces -- violent crime is way down (yes, even in the US). So, the vast majority of people die in old age.

I'm not sure we won't lick the mortality problem eventually. Looking at things people are playing with in the lab these days -- most importantly, the experiements in growing new tissues and organs -- I think I have a fair shot at a century, and you may live well beyond that. I have no idea how long today's children will live, but mortality may be a distant hypothetical for them for longer then current lifespans.

And then there's social progress, in all of its forms, from better governments and institutions to the continual spread of tolerance of differences. I don't think we'll ever be rid of war and oppression, but I think both will become much rarer than they are today.

In short, we're delivering on hope. Many of the routine terrors of life have been tamed, and we reasonably expect to tame more.

[caladri]

If the goalposts of terror were fixed, though, we would cease to be too much affected, though. We have new terrors. Say, unforeseen mental and socio-psychological issues arising from extended lifespans. Beating mortality means the greater existential threats become the more immediate ones: something will get you eventually, and the long-shots are not gentle. And, as the objects of fear are beaten further away and made less immediate, when they do come about it is more striking. Dying in an industrial accident is a more terrifying event today, precisely because we are so well past the point when (in this country and its ilk) they were at their peak. Dying of starvation is a lot more horrifying as an observer of the world when one is not oneself doing so, but is reminded that one only survives with a vast safety net, and without it one would starve, too.

[twoeleven]

Right; I'm sure there's a psych terms for the kind of accomodation we do our situation improves. But still, I think d(terror)/dt < 1, and maybe << 1. We are finding new things to worry about, but I think they're less terrifying and more distant than they used to be. Sure, we worry more about certain kinds of accidents now that they're less common -- I think; it's hard to tell, since I've been accident-prone fields for years, and I'm inured to the risks -- but I think most people regard them as momentary horrors, seen on the news, and forgotten in tomorrow's headlines.

I mean, how many people are now talking about how tragic it is that Mandela has died, and have forgotten about Sunday's train boo-boo? I can think of few terrors worse than being trapped on an out of control vehicle -- and I imagine that people who take trains to work were nervously flinching at every unremembered bump and lurch for a couple of days -- but the immediacy has faded. It's old news, now buried under strata of Mandela's death, and whatshisname's car accident, and whatever the latest scandals are.

Dying of starvation is a lot more horrifying as an observer of the world when one is not oneself doing so, but is reminded that one only survives with a vast safety net, and without it one would starve, too.
I can't agree, because I see no likelihood that that safety net would entirely disappear in any reasonable time frame. Sure, I can dream up scenarios when that might happen, but I can't convince myself that they're likely.

[caladri]

You're being excessively-rational, I think. Which is probably not something you'll mind me saying much :) It's not about likelihood, but severity of outcome, and the feeling of potential inevitability/unavoidability. The train example is a good one, in that sense. The train you're on may have already started to derail.

[twoeleven]

No, I don't mind; it's all I'm good at. :)

The train you're on may have already started to derail.
Sure. I mean, we're in for a rough ride already WRT global warming. It may even be an exciting ride in my lifetime, if the worst predictions bear out, or we screw something else up. (Increased rainfall plus a new variant on Ug99 wheat rust → way too much fun for words.)

The whole of Spaceship Earth™ may go flying off the rails, or at least the feeble candle we call civilization. But I'll worry about it when the lurching goes beyond normal, despite possibility that we're already committed to that fate. If nothing else, I can pretend what I do matters.

[marzipan_pig]

I can't quite say you can fist my ham anytime, but, the metaphor of a ham and fisting is OK with me here.

I get more caught in an individual thing, that we're all trapped in our own existences where we are basically MAKING UP our meaning. Even shared meaning is made up.

Also when I realized a) not everyone had visual snow b) it's really me seeing my own visual field at work and c) my best friend was like I HAD NO IDEA about me having it, I got a little panicky about how I will NEVER get out of the reality of my body meditating my sensory experience.

I know some ppl feel egolessness must be bliss; the 'everywhere and nowhere' or 'the universe blowing through me' experiences I've had were pretty much terrifying while also sort of awe-inspiringly great. They were almost almost surely largely triggered by a physiological quirk where in some orientations, my tonsils flop back over my windpipe and I stop getting an appropriate amount of oxygen to my brain, ie, dying will probably feel a little like that.

[caladri]

I got a little panicky about how I will NEVER get out of the reality of my body meditating my sensory experience

I know the feeling well. I spent years being intermittently horrified just by that as derived from visual snow. Nowadays I'm more comfortable with it, because of its mutability rather than its stability, and what is stable besides. That is, I don't mind that I can now almost always experience LSD comedown-style melting text, because it's so obviously just something new I learned to do with my eyes and my perception. There's a time it would have terrified me for its inescapability, but now I at least feel like the things I really can't escape mostly nurture me and give life to everything I have ever cared about. On good days, anyway.