[I was going through a bunch of old files and found this gem of an essay. If the timestamp on the file is accurate it’s from February 2010, which means it’s almost exactly ten years old and predates this blog by about three years. Past me was very weird, so enjoy!]
I am writing this essay as a critique of a fundamental and unsolvable problem in philosophy today. Our greatest minds refuse to acknowledge this problem, so I have humbly taken it upon myself to explore more fully this hidden paradox.
Amongst all of the different philosophies, religions, and world-views, there is one common theme, so utterly pervasive that it has never before been questioned, yet so utterly false upon deeper inspection that it boggles the mind. It is my hope that this short essay will act as a call to arms for the oppressed masses in the field of higher thought, and prompt them to action demanding an end to this conspiracy.
The problem, ladies and gentlemen, in long and in short, is that of existence. Every thought, every idea, every concept that humankind has ever had rests on the central pillar, the core belief, that we exist. Not content, of course, with this simpler sophistry, humankind has embarked on an even more heinous error of logic – we assume not only that we exist, but that other things exist as well.
It is at this point, of course, that your conditioning takes over – “Of course we exist”, you say, “how could it be otherwise”? This is the knee-jerk reaction typical of an oppressed thinker today, and the prevalence of this mindless assertion – calling it a failure of an argument would be too kind – worries me more than I can say about the future of our society. Beyond the obvious lack of critical thinking evidenced by such lemming-like idiocies, this simple error is the cause of deeper, more dangerous problems as well.
But I digress. I will leave the deeper analysis of this crisis to the historians who survive it, and turn my own meagre talents to the task of alerting the public of this travesty. It is with heart-felt distress that I type my final plea to you, the thinking public – “Do you believe”?
