Not too long ago, I asked in the comments what the commentariat’s favorite stretch of road is. The answers ranged from US 7 in the Massachusetts Berkshires to Highway 95 to Zzyzx in the Mojave Desert and everything in between. That post was a lead up to this article which I’ve been planning for some time. Most of my submissions to the site have been self-important, bloviating, pseudo-philosophical dreck best left to stoned college sophomores. For a change of pace, I thought I’d write a simple love letter to my favorite stretch of road, along with some purty pictures.
The Silver Thread
I speak, of course, of the article’s eponymous road, The Silver Thread, aka: CO-149, one of Colorado’s Scenic Byways.
Cute, likes you and never says “no”.
Beautiful when she lets down her hair.
I have been traveling this road to the Undisclosed Location since I was six months old and it will never be replaced in my heart as my favorite drive. While it’s most definitely beautiful, it’s more like the cute and comfortable girl-next-door. Not the popular cheerleader like US 550 from Durango to Ouray,
She’d rather be with the quarterback.
or the unattainable bombshell like the Richardson Highway from Delta Junction to Valdez.
Wouldn’t give you the time of day.
It’s not seductively dark and mysterious like the Redwood Highway,
Who knows what pleasures lie in those curves?
nor exotic and sensuous like US 1 from Miami to Key West.
¡Muy caliente!
Nevertheless, it is “my road” (not really, but I think of it that way), and I think it’s as beautiful as the day I met her.
This 117 mile stretch of road runs from South Fork to US 50 just west of Gunnison. In the process it goes over two passes: Spring Creek Pass, 10,898 feet where it crosses the Continental Divide,
Pee in both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific simultaneously.
and Slumgullion Pass, 11,530 feet.
Before.
Slumgullion is in an area that has been hit the hardest by the spruce beetle epidemic and the picture above shows it before the epidemic hit. The following picture is after.
After.
This is what a good realtor would call “emerging views”. The road also passes through the charming old mining towns of Creede and Lake City.
Creede.
Lake City.
In my opinion, of the two, Lake City is the more scenic and has the bizarre story of Alferd Packer, the legendary cannibal and subject of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s first foray into writing (“Cannibal: The Musical”). It also sits at the base of five of Colorado’s Fouteeners; Uncompahgre Peak, Wetterhorn Peak, Handies Peak, Redcloud Peak and Mt. Sunshine.
Creede was the more productive mining town and has more Wild West heritage, counting Soapy Smith, Poker Alice, Bat Masterson and Robert Ford among its previous residents. Lake City gets its name from Lake San Cristobal, a natural lake formed when about 10,000 years ago a massive landslide, called the Slumgullion slide, broke off the mountain and dammed up the Gunnison River.
Lake San Cristobal.
Slumgullion Slide.
Lake City is also the gateway to the Alpine Loop, a great 4×4 trail that loops from Lake City to Ouray to Silverton and back to Lake City.
Top of Cinnamon Pass in the Alpine Loop.
Beginning of Engineer Pass in the Alpine Loop.
Fall colors on the Alpine Loop.
The Silver Thread represents my little slice of Heaven of hiking, shooting, fishing, offroading and drinking. Driving on it always means that I can look forward to what it’s all about.
I recently returned from the Undisclosed Location at the Rio Grande National Forest in the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado. Beginning in approximately 2002, a spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) epidemic has been spreading across this region, peaking in 2014 but still going on to this day. For those not familiar, the primary pests of slow-growing mountain conifers are bark beetles; spruce, fir and pine all have closely related species of this pest that will attack. About the size of a pencil lead, these little buggers are naturally occurring in all mixed conifer forests at varying background levels. They survive by boring into tree bark where they then lay their eggs. The larva hatch and grow within the tree, typically taking two years before reaching maturity and going out on their own to a new tree.
Spruce Beetles
As the larva mature, they burrow around within the tree creating a “gallery”. The larva, along with the adult beetles, disrupt the flow of xylem and phloem in the tree. The trees do have natural defenses against the beetles and a tree that is attacked does not always die. The tree will usually push sap through the gallery to try and push out enough of the invaders so that their activity is not fatal. However, every so often, conditions become favorable for a population explosion of the pests. They’ll multiply like crazy, finding abundant resources and will go on a mass killing spree until they run out of food. Before you know it, you have a ghost forest.
Rio Grande National “Forest”
For the past 20ish years, the mean temperature in the Southern Rockies has been about 2F higher than historic averages. This gets environuts’ panties in a twist even though mean temperature is meaningless when it comes to the beetles, except indirectly in how it relates to drought (don’t worry, this is not going to turn into a rant against “climate change”, though warm winters are part of the issue). One of the negative feedbacks against beetle epidemics is transient extremely low temperatures. If the temperature drops to -40F for a continuous 24-hour period, the beetles will die and the invasion will end. Temperatures that low are not unusual in the Rockies, but it is unusual for it to stay that low for that long. The other factors important to an outbreak are drought and overall tree health. Drought is also not uncommon in this part of the country; in fact it’s been part and parcel of life in the American Mountain West since long before the alphabet soup networks even existed, let alone took notice of it in service to their agenda. More precipitation provides more resources for the trees to defend themselves.
None of that matters though if the forest is overcrowded, creating a high median tree age and fierce competition for resources. All of that increases tree stress and makes them much more susceptible to attack. Decades and decades of fire suppression and forest mismanagement in the West has created extreme overcrowding in many of the forests. Forest fires also get environuts’ panties in a twist, but they, in their hubris and stupidity, fail to understand that small fires thin out and renew forests. By suppressing fire completely (which has been policy for 100 years) the forest gets beyond crowded, making a catastrophic fire that completely sterilizes the landscape much more likely. If you keep suppressing so that even such a catastrophic fire doesn’t happen, the beetles move in; which leads me to the first lesson of the ghost forest.
Human Hubris is Boundless
Humans’ relationship with Nature has changed significantly since the Industrial Revolution. In a primarily agricultural society, people view Nature with fearful awe; it is either a life-giving force that helps your crops grow and provides for you, or it is a cruel puppeteer starving and torturing you. As humans have become more urbanized and less connected to this dichotomy, they have begun to view Nature through rose-colored glasses and idealize it as a long-suffering Mother ruined by the sinfulness of human existence (see also: watermelon cult of Gaia). In our hubris, we began thinking we could save Nature from our nefarious influence and started meddling. Admittedly, some of this has resulted in positive outcomes and we have cleaner air and water as a result. But most of the time, when we try to manipulate Nature, even with noble and pure motives, we just fuck things up worse once Nature reasserts itself.
When looking at the ghost forest around the Undisclosed Location, I’m filled with sadness at the destruction, but I also laugh at Nature smacking down our forestry “experts” for trying to circumvent its will. The trees must die off; whether that be through fire or through disease, Nature will find a way no matter how much we try to fuck with it. Which segues to lesson two.
Nature is Right and We’re Wrong
The miraculous thing about this process is that, not only is it necessary, it’s healthy. To us, forests are immovable, unchanging monoliths. Especially in coniferous forests, the trees grow so slowly and live so long that in our limited view, we think that they will continue in their present form perpetually. Therefore, again in our hubris, we believe that preserving that form at all costs is the right thing to do and that we are actually helping Nature. We’re wrong. The forest is a living organism just as much as a human city. There are cycles of birth, death and rebirth happening all the time, even if it’s on a timescale too long for an individual human to appreciate. Pioneer species move in, thrive, die off and make way for new species over hundreds of years. After all, trees, just like us, don’t live forever, but we like to think they do. Understanding that something so huge, ancient and apparently implacable as a 500-year-old, 150-foot-tall Engelmann spruce is mortal brings our own fleeting mortality into stark relief. Protecting the forest really means protecting ourselves from the inevitability of Death.
The beauty of this system, however, is that the beetles only attack trees over a certain trunk diameter, leaving the babies (“only” 30 or 40 years old) unharmed. Unhobbled by competition for resources from their elders, and with new, abundant access to sunlight, the babies have explosive new growth; up to a foot per year in some cases (insanely fast for high altitude conifers). Furthermore, the aforementioned abundant sunlight activates dormant underground complexes of aspen (which can’t grow without it) to start sending up shoots. Aspen is the weed of the tree world and will grow like a plague if given the chance. Soon (only 10 or 20 years) the forest will be filled with aspen and the baby spruce will slow down again (but not die). If you were able to peer down to the forest floor of the picture above, you’d see an explosion of life restarting the endless struggle of existence. Which leads me to the final lesson from the ghost forest.
The Two Most Important Survival Qualities are Resilience and Determination
The forest itself is incredibly resilient. It bounces back amazingly quickly from a beetle Holocaust, fire or even human-caused catastrophes like clear-cutting. But I speak now not of the overall resilience and health of the forest as amazing as it is, but of individual trees. Walking through the ghost forest, very occasionally, maybe 1 in 500 trees, you’ll see a tall, noble, ancient tree that stood its ground and survived the onslaught. You’ll see the sawdust from the beetles at the base and the holes made as they emerged. You’ll see the “pitch out” where the tree tried to flush out the invaders with sap. Somehow, while all its peers were succumbing to the epidemic, it stood tall and survived. How? Why? Was it pure luck? Probably. But I like to think that somewhere deep down in its non-sentient existence, it just wouldn’t give up. Its determination to survive and resilience in the aftermath mean it stands alone and earns the privilege of life. Even if that’s overly romantic anthropomorphizing, I still think it’s a very valuable lesson.
Coda
All susceptible trees around the Undisclosed Location died in 2010. The beetles have moved on and will continue moving on until they run out of food and eventually they too die. In the intervening years, it has been amazing to watch the forest begin the long process of regeneration. Already in places that just five years ago were bare, aspen are six feet tall. The ghosts of the past still haunt the forest, and will likely continue to stand for another decade or two before falling down and returning their life essence to the ground from which they sprang. Someday, in a couple hundred years, the baby spruce that survived this plague will have grown beyond the aspen, blocking out the sun and thirstily drinking up all the resources. The aspen will then die or go dormant in the ground, waiting for the next unspeakable massacre; just as we, along with who knows how many subsequent generations, will be dead. And so it goes.
Flashback nearly a decade and you’ll find me toiling away in a filthy (custodians would typically not go into the labs for fear of getting blamed for something going wrong) basement lab working on an algorithm for my doctoral thesis. Identifying exotic particles (eg: magnetic monopoles, Q-balls, strangelets, etc.) in cosmic ray datasets is not exactly what you’d call the most employable pursuit. However, it was definitely more useful than SJW grievance studies, more interesting than working as a glorified proofreader for other people’s code like some of my friends and I wasn’t paying for it, so what the Hell? Everyone knows the real reason you get into physics is for the pussy anyway (hahahahaha, oh I almost made it through typing that without LOLing).
So here I am cannibalizing standing on the shoulders of giants, using previous theoretical mathematical work on Bayesian predictive inference. Mathematics like this had been around for decades, this was just a novel application of it and formed the basis of my thesis work. I was creating an algorithm to use simulated training data and a Bayesian comparison between said training data and real data to try and identify compositional limits on particles theorized to exist but never observed (aforementioned MMs, strangelets, Q-balls etc.). While certainly fun to talk about at parties and a real panty peeler (more LOL), the thought that I’d use any of this stuff in the real world seemed remote. I had already ruled out pursuing a career in academia, so I figured I’d just go become a code monkey like my friends. Little did I know that I was inadvertently making myself eminently employable in a field that has become the new “hot thing” in tech.
A Rose By Any Other Name is Just as Confusing
At the time, this field was limited to academia and a few tech companies that were using it to claw their way to the top (see: Google, Facebook, Amazon, et. al.). It didn’t even have a name other than just “statistics” or “data analytics”; boring pedestrian things that only the pocket protector squad cared about. Glamorous Silicon Valley VCs would never get on board with such dull nonsense. So, being the innovators that they are, techies rebranded this field “data science” employing “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning”. I personally have issues with all these monikers; “data science” is just meaningless (in spite of that being my job title) and “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” both suffer from the same problem. Namely, they both imply that a computer is learning in the same fashion as a human brain. My preferred moniker is “predictive analytics” since I think it captures reality better and doesn’t overstate what the algorithm is doing to some kind of mind reading and/or Skynet AI.
So what exactly is it? Well, the short explanation is that any predictive algorithm takes parametric data inputs to build a statistical model that will predict the outcome of future iterations within some uncertainty. Essentially, you start with a set of “training data” with known outcomes, the algorithm then processes that data to build a model of how each parameter affects the outcome. You then feed the algorithm a set of test data, it applies the model to all the parameters, makes a prediction, then looks at the known outcome and scores whether it’s correct, a false positive or a false negative. If the algorithm passes some human-defined threshold, it starts working to make predictions on real-world data, all the while refining its model to get better as it processes more data. This real-time refinement is where the “learning” and “artificial intelligence” stuff comes in. To an external observer, it looks like the computer is learning and adapting; which in a way it is, but only in some narrowly defined brute-force iterative way within specific parameters. It has none of the heuristic properties of human intelligence. Perhaps someday we’ll unlock the secrets of the human mind and be able to simulate true intelligence, but I see that as a long way off.
How It Makes Your Life Better
As stated, this kind of analysis has been used in mathematical and academic settings for a long time, but the first exposure I ever had to it in the real world was a fun little quiz called the Gender Test at www.thespark.com (to early internet denizens, this was kind of a forerunner to places like College Humor, Ebaum’s World and finally the Glib-approved favorite, The Chive). This test asked a series of seemingly irrelevant questions such as “Which word is more gross, used or moist?” and showing pictures of two different cartoon monkeys asking “Which one will win?” After 50 or so of these kinds of questions, the quiz would then predict if you were male of female and ask if it got it right. This was long before the misgendering insanity so it was a binary choice; each time it got it right, it increased the relative weights of the preceding questions toward that gender. Each time it was wrong, it reduced the weights. The very first time someone took the test, the prediction was pure chance. But after a couple hundred thousand iterations, the relative gender weighting on the questions got pretty good and the algorithm could predict male or female almost all the time. In this case, the answers to the questions were the parameters and the gender was the predictive variable. While it may seem simple minded, this basic paradigm is what drives most of our modern computational conveniences.
Every time you search something in Google, that’s a set of parameters used to refine its model. It gets better and better at searching. Each time you “like” something on Facebook or click a link in Twitter or look at a job posting on LinkedIn, their models refine and get a little bit better. Each time you ask Siri something, she gets a little better at understanding you (remember when you first unboxed your new iPhone and Siri asked you to say a few things at startup? There’s your training data).
Of course the most important innovation is in the industry that is always the tip of the technological spear: porn. This goes way beyond dumbly suggesting videos tagged “big tits” after you’ve searched for big tits. EVERYTHING you do is a parametric data point. Among the videos you watch, are the tits real or fake? How big are they exactly? Is this lesbian, one on one hetero, threesome, group or something more exotic? What parts of the scene do you linger on? Go even further and perhaps there’s eye tracking technology (tape over your webcam people). What part of the tits do you look at the longest? In what sequence do you look at them? Is there a type of nipple you gaze at longer? Can the nipples themselves be broken down into parametric data for classification? The possibilities are endless. In this way, the porn site “learns” not only what your revealed preferences are, but it also can use data from other users with similar preferences to suggest things that you yourself might not even know you like. Like big tits? Might we suggest these ebony strap-on compilations for you?
There are of course more pedestrian applications like what I’m working on professionally now. We have biopsy slides that have been pre-tagged by experienced pathologists as cancerous or non-cancerous. The algorithm does pixel-by-pixel imagery analysis to classify features that indicate cancer or not. The hope is that eventually the algorithm will get good enough that it can identify cancer on its own, even in stages too early for a human to see. It’s not nearly as cool as porn, but a guy’s gotta eat right?
How it Ruins Your Life
Coolness factor aside, this way of doing things can quickly cross over from nifty to creepy. Target famously has an algorithm that not only tracks what you buy, but will automatically latch onto your smartphone and track your movements in the store. The most amazing (read: creepy) application of this is its ability, through lots of training and refinement, to tell the gender of the customer, the approximate age of the customer, whether the customer is pregnant and the approximate due date of the customer before she herself even knows she’s pregnant. All this is possible from millions of data points of known pregnant women (going from buying prenatal vitamins, to stretch mark cream to eventually diapers and formula) and their purchases and movements around the store leading up to the birth. The more times this happens, the better the algorithm gets.
One might be tempted to actually put this in the “how it improves your life” column. After all, Target can offer you discounts on things it knows you’ll need and make your life more convenient in the process. However, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how this can quickly morph into something very sinister, very quickly.
Creepy when a private company does it, this becomes nefarious when a government does it. Even worse is when government gets in bed with private companies to start profiling you based on your data. Buying a lot of fertilizer? Maybe you’re making a bomb. Let’s look at literally every parameter that comprises your life for the past decade to see (at a 95% confidence level) if you’re a terrorist. G-d help us if we ever get to a point in which this kind of shit is accepted in a court of law. We would literally have a Minority Report Pre-Crime situation on our hands.
Every single thing you do, seemingly significant or not, is a parametric data point that can be fed into an ML algorithm to extract features, classify them and make predictions about you. Not just what toothpaste you use, but how long and how often you brush. Do you start from the molars or the incisors? Do you gargle your mouthwash? What are your favorite sexual positions? How loud are your orgasms? Do you own a tabby or a tuxedo cat? Do you typically move your bowels in the morning or the evening? Do you configure your toilet paper over or under? People like to think that this kind of data collection is limited to conscious decisions like the products they buy or the places they go, but that is barely scratching the surface. Emotions, unconscious behaviors, pointless or useless decisions of daily life; these things are the treasure trove that gives insight into your essence. The eyes are not the window to the soul, Big Data is. The only way to escape it is to forsake all modern technology, retreat to the woods and live as if it’s the 18th century (behavior which itself, by the way, offers a ton of data about you).
Now of course all of this can be used for good or ill. In all seriousness, a change in bowel habits could indicate a health problem. But let’s not be naive about the true nature of how these technologies are/will be used. To those who crave power and long to rule us, these developments are a gift from Heaven (or, more likely, Hell). These analytical techniques, so seemingly innocuous when Thomas Bayes first pioneered them 300 (!) years ago have opened a can of worms that could enslave the human race in ways Big Brother could only dream of. If Bayes could see what’s happening now he might echo Oppenheimer; “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Unfortunately, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the future. Constitutional protections have proven toothless, people stupidly *volunteer* massive amounts of data and the data that they don’t volunteer gets vacuumed up by an ever more intrusive State. The campus #metoo squad is just the advanced scouting group checking out how fortified the “innocent until proven guilty” doctrine is; a trial balloon for the destruction of due process.
Working in the field I do only makes me more pessimistic because I see how powerful this is first hand. My advice: well, I don’t really have any; aside from the aforementioned retreat into the woods. Other than that, all you can do is continue to support causes that shore up data privacy protections and defend against 4th Amendment violations. That’s at least a finger in the dike (not finger in the dyke you perverts).
But, hey, at least PornHub’s suggested viewing is spot on right?
NB: This piece speaks about suicide in an abstract and philosophical manner and should not be construed as advocating for or endorsing suicide. If for whatever reason, you have stumbled upon this page and are actively considering suicide, please go here or call 1-800-273-8255.
Preamble
This is probably not going to be a happy or fun piece. Death is sad. It represents the great unknown; the termination of our fragile existence into something we know not what. It is permanent; more permanent than anything else we deal with in this world. And it causes overwhelming emotions of loss, grief and sadness. Suicide adds many additional dimensions to this. When someone chooses to die, the typical emotions of grief are compounded by a whole host of other emotions; confusion, anger, guilt and helplessness all come along for the ride. Perhaps most pernicious, suicide seems to be contagious in that friends and family of people who have committed suicide are more likely to experience suicidal feelings and even carry it out. Along with criminal acts like rape, incest and murder, suicide is one of the most taboo actions we have in our (read: Western) culture. I struggled with whether or not I should even write this piece lest the unlikely event of someone reading it was driven to commit suicide (hence the disclaimer above). That fear and the stigma surrounding suicide makes it a difficult topic to discuss dispassionately. Why should this be? What goes into a person making the decision to self-terminate? Can it really ever be called a rational decision? These are the questions I’m going to try and tackle.
Who Commits Suicide?
Before getting into this, first I think I better define what I mean when I’m talking about suicide in this piece. There is a somewhat fine line between suicide and euthanasia. When I think of euthanasia, I think of someone with a terminal illness for whom death is imminent regardless of what action they take. They are also suffering greatly and would prefer to “get it over with” rather than suffer through a few more weeks or months of pain before expiring. As is wont to happen, this definition is expanding in places where euthanasia is legal to include people with mental illnesses or non-terminal but painful conditions. After all, we’re all terminal, it’s just a matter of the timescale right? That further blurs the line between suicide and euthanasia. The difference, as I see it, is that someone who is depressed is not going to experience depression as an imminent proximate cause of death. It may be horrendously painful, but there is at least a somewhat decent possibility that that person can receive treatment and return to some kind of baseline level of health. The same cannot (usually) be said of someone with Stage IV brain cancer. There is plenty of debate about euthanasia and its ethical and moral implications as well, and it certainly is related to suicide, but it’s not what I want to talk about here. To that end, when I refer to suicide, I’m talking about a person making a conscious decision to end his life when there is no physical condition that will otherwise cause imminent death. (I can already see you saying “depression is a physical condition!” Yes it is, but if you lock a severely depressed person in a room without the means to kill himself and force feed him to keep him from starving, he’ll certainly be miserable, but the depression on its own won’t cause him to keel over).
Because of stigma and shame surrounding suicide, it’s notoriously difficult to get quality statistics on it. Often, surviving families, if there’s any ambiguity, will try and get the cause of death to be classified as accidental to avoid that shame. For example, it’s estimated that the majority of opiate overdose related deaths are actually intentional, but it’s very likely that most/all of them get classified as accidental. With that caveat, best quality studies put incidence at around 1% of the population or 12 out of every 100,000 people. This number puts it at about the same prevalence as schizophrenia, though the real number is likely higher. About 75% of all suicides occur in the developed world and are overwhelmingly male. Although women are more likely to attempt suicide, approximately four times as many men succeed (some regional variation exists). It’s hard to peel apart “suicidal gestures” and “calls for help” from authentic suicide attempts so that even further muddies the statistical water. Speaking generally, suicide is most common in Europe (especially Eastern Europe), Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. It is least common in East/Southeast Asia (Japan and South Korea being notable exceptions) and Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. There is a pretty solid inverse correlation between the level of collective religiosity of a population and prevalence of suicide. Most religions put a very strong prohibition on suicide, Catholicism going so far as to classify it as a mortal sin on par with murder. Most of these prohibitions stem from the view that life is a gift from G-d and rejecting that gift is the ultimate contemptuous rebellion toward the Creator. Along with explicit prohibition on suicide, religious people are more likely to be members of tight-knit communities of like-minded people; a suicide preventative.
Why?
This is the question that invariably haunts friends and loved ones in the aftermath of a suicide. Very occasionally, people will commit ideologically motivated suicide as a political statement (think Buddhist monks self-immolating during Vietnam) and their purpose is pretty clear. These are outliers, however. It is far more common for the reason to be, if not a complete mystery, then opaque at best. Even in the presence of a detailed note, people left behind are often flummoxed about the reasoning of the suicidal individual. However, this is one of the key things to understand about suicide; the suicidal individual’s thinking is often distorted and the reasoning leading to the conclusion that suicide is appropriate only makes sense to said individual. This is important because it calls into question the assumption that suicide is a rational decision. Is distorted logic somehow inferior to “consensus” logic? What does “distorted logic” even mean?
One thing is for certain: suicide almost always leaves a trail of destruction behind it. The shattered families, inconsolable grief, confusion about motive and unanswerable questions will haunt those left behind forever. As stated before, it can be contagious. I have personal experience in which family friends experienced the suicide of the father, then both daughters within a 5 year span, leaving the mother alone. Needless to say, this was an unparalleled tragedy that resulted in nothing but misery, pain and nihilism. After seeing that kind of shitshow, it’s very hard to be dispassionate and logical about the ethical implications of suicide. However, as a group of people driven primarily by principle, such an analysis should be done.
Self Ownership
A keystone of libertarian philosophy is the axiom of absolute self-ownership. What you do to yourself, as long as it doesn’t violate the NAP, is permitted unquestionably. This goes for drug use, sexual behavior, obesity etc. All is not fun and games, however, as you are expected to bear the burden of responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. Don’t smoke 3 packs a day and then expect the taxpayer to bail you out when you get cancer.
That said, is suicide a violation of the NAP? I’m inclined to say no. You are hurting your loved ones and the people around you, but are you engaging in aggression toward them? Not in the sense that you’re endangering their physical safety or liberty directly. One could argue that smoking 3 packs a day is suicide, just in slow motion. If we agree that’s acceptable behavior, then giving a blow job to a .357 is equally acceptable.
This brings me back to the “distorted thinking” point from earlier. Can someone who chooses to self-terminate really be considered to be “in their right mind” and capable of making such a choice? I say the question is irrelevant because being in a state of “right-mindedness” does not have a clear definition. Distinct from the “reasonable person” standard of law, postulating some kind of philosophical “right mind” takes us down a slippery slope that leads to reeducation, crimethink and “enthusiastic consent” arguments re: drunken sex. What about if someone has dementia or schizophrenia and is imagining things that are objectively false which leads him to suicide? This is a situation in which philosophical vagueness comes into play and I don’t have an easy answer (a bit of shameless self promotion, check out my discourse on vagueness here). The distinction between distorted and undistorted thinking is a blurry one and the unintended consequences of trying to define it solidly are too great. Besides, this goes into a question of motives, which ultimately are irrelevant. Why does someone smoke 3 packs a day when he knows how bad it is for him? Doesn’t matter. Mind your own business. Fuck off, slaver.
These edge cases certainly don’t justify nullifying the larger principle of self-ownership, so I feel comfortable declaring suicide to be ethical from a libertarian perspective. (Reminder: ethics are derived from external codes of conduct and morals are principles on which an individual’s judgement of right and wrong are based; they are intertwined but not identical). If libertarian ethics are derived primarily from the NAP, then I can’t see how suicide is unethical. I believe as libertarians, we have to reserve the right of people to terminate their own existence. After all, your own self is your most fundamental piece of property, and you can dispose of your property however you wish. To say that you are partially owned by your loved ones opens the door to slavery. If one really wanted to construct an ethical argument against suicide without referencing religion (which is easy: G-d said not to), you’d have to fall back on deontological arguments. One could say that implicit in a marriage contract and/or the implied contract between parent and child when said child is brought into the world is a duty to live for the sake of those people. I’m OK if you want to make that argument; it at least seems to be logically consistent, but that’s as far as I go. I don’t believe any similar argument can be made in regards to the relationship between a suicidal person and his parents or his friends. Taking that approach very quickly slides into “social contract” territory and we all know where that ends up (nowhere good). To be sure™, I’m not even sure how I feel about “implicit” clauses in marriage and parental relationships; if your future spouse is known to be suicidal, put a prohibition against suicide in your vows (or better yet, don’t get married to that person).
What of morality? Well, trshmnstr had an excellent piece about, what he called Deferentialism vs. Restraintism (see here) that sums up two opposing philosophies of how libertarians can approach the problems of moral relativism inherent to libertarian thought. In each case, however, I think the approach to the problem of suicide is similar to the problem of drug use. Many libertarians recognize how stupid it is to shoot heroin. They may condemn it as evil and morally reprehensible. However, no libertarian worth his salt would say using it should be illegal or a reason to be locked in a cage. Suicide is trickier because, if carried out properly, there is no one to arrest or lock up. The only way then for it to be codified as wrong is in a personal code of conduct or with a deity. I’ve already argued that, in spite of its colossal collateral damage, suicide is not a strict violation of the NAP. Therefore, it has to fall into the same category as drug use or adultery or promiscuity or a host of other social pathologies that libertarians must tolerate in order to live in a free society. Whether an individual considers it to be immoral likely falls on the Deferentialist/Restraintist spectrum.
Coda
When it comes to suicide, I fall on the Restraintist side of the aisle. I strongly condemn it as both immoral and stupid. I recognize a person’s right to take himself out of the game, but I also reserve the right to call that person a moron making a terrible decision. I say this not without compassion for those suffering through deep depression which distorts reality to the point that suicide seems rational. However, life is about taking personal responsibility. Part of being a fully actualized, mature human being is being capable of knowing when things in your life are going sideways, and then acting to fix them. Some people see suicide as “fixing” their problems and I suppose in some ways it does. However, to use a cliché, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It’s sending your car to the junkyard when the brakes go bad. It’s tunnel vision resulting in extreme selfishness. No matter how much you may think it, people will not be better off without you. And if you need to find a reason to live, you can always look at boobs on the internet.
“I don’t know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.”
-Woody Allen
“In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. [But] every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”
-Neil Gaiman
“Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”
-George Carlin
I place blame for this piece squarely on the shoulders of the commentariat. Discussions that began with the absurdity of #metoo quickly went down the rabbit hole of analyses of the sexual marketplace, human mating strategy and unending (indeed, unendable) sexual conflict between men and women. This forced me to think about things, which forced me to want to record and share them, which further forced me to embarrass myself and torture you all once again by inflicting my writing upon you. You have no one to blame but yourselves.
The Backstory
Let me begin with a disclaimer: I am not a biologist nor an expert on evolution or human sexuality. There are likely droves of people in the commentariat that are infinitely more knowledgable about these things than I am. To them, I apologize and please throw rotten vegetables in the comment section. To everyone else that doesn’t know any better, I am a 100% super-knowledgable expert on everything, so take every single word I say as gospel.
“Cave woman seeks cave man, must be at least 5’8″ to ride.”
Good, now that we’ve got that figured out, let’s start with a little story. You are Ug, an archaic male human, newly evolved to self-awareness and roaming the Savannah. You are 16, right in the prime of life, but rapidly approaching middle age. You are ruled by three overwhelming urges that dictate the terms of your existence; thirst, hunger and horniness. Fortunately for you, you have access to watering holes and you’re pretty handy with a spear so the first two are generally taken care of. One day, you come across Oog, an archaic female human with beautiful eyes and hairy pits just the way you like them. Because you are a human, you have no idea if she’s ovulating, all you know is that you need to get little Ug wet immediately. You show your best PUA skills, and 3 minutes later you have scratched that itch that has been bothering you for months. Nine months later, Oog has given birth to a beautiful baby girl Aag. You still have awkward encounters with Oog and see her about the Savannah, but when you see her with Aag you’re not really sure what to make of it. You don’t quite understand that your amorous activities 9 months ago could have caused this; you’re not really sure about anything. Oog could have had sex with 20 different guys and any one of them could be the father, but you don’t know that. Your knowledge of the situation is almost completely opaque. However, what you do know is that she has a baby with her now that needs nonstop attention and resources. Something inside you, another thing you don’t quite understand, is driving you to try and help her take care of this thing. So, against your better judgement, you start sharing your food and water with her and the baby and life goes on, a vision of domestic bliss, complete with a white picket fence around the cave.
The catch is that, Ug may not realize it, but he cannot possibly be sure that he is, in fact, the father of Aag. This is one of the two reasons that he doesn’t pull an alpha lion and kill Aag; the other one being “love” aka: a cascade of hormones (vasopressin, oxytocin, estradiol among others) that create a pair bond and make him want to take care of Oog and Aag and make more babies. So, rather than running back out on the Savannah and chasing some hot new strange, he embraces monogamy, otherwise known as making the best out of a bad situation.
Big Dicks and Horny Chicks
Our bodies and behaviors are museums dedicated to the millennia of evolution that have shaped the human race. Some adaptations are legacies from the larger course of mammalian evolution, internal fertilization, placental fetal nourishment and the eponymous mammary glands providing nourishment post-birth. There are, however, a number of adaptations that are unique (or nearly unique) to humans that must have evolved relatively quickly and can only be explained by sexual selection (physiologic changes brought about by mate preference pressure rather than environmental pressure). Human males have unusually large penises for primates, both as a percentage of body size and in absolute terms. They also lack an os penis or penis bone. The vast majority of mammals have a bone that will actually move into the penis during arousal to create an erection. Human males rely on hydraulic pressure from blood to get the job done. This also means that human penises are a bit more pliable during sex, getting to those hard to reach places. It’s an open question why these adaptations to the human penis happened, but it’s a safe bet that women chose men with these characteristics and had more babies with them. More pleasure? Consequence of bipedal locomotion? Not sure.
For the ladies there are two big ones. The first is my personal favorite; permanently engorged breasts. Biologists are reasonably certain that these are a consequence of humans’ preference for face-to-face sex and evolved as a visual stimulus analogous to the buttock that most male mammals would see while getting their freak on. Preference for large ones could be an indicator of age as bigguns tend to droop as a woman ages. The other adaptation is really important; concealed ovulation combined with year-round sexual availability. This means that humans have no mating season and women are DTF any time. It also means that a lack of being “in heat” ensures that neither partner knows if a particular copulation likely resulted in offspring being produced. This element of paternal uncertainty is essential to the way human relationships developed over time.
Whycome No Pics?
In case you need examples of how this all works (we’re all socially maladjusted failures around here, so it’s entirely possible), I have a pop-up book I can lend you. Before we completely lose the script here, I want to say that the previous story and examples of biological oddity that we humans have are simply to demonstrate that competing sexual strategy has always existed between men and women. This is expressed in our biology and it is certainly expressed in our behavior (what this tome will eventually come around to focusing on). Every animal has such an imbalance to some extent; it’s unavoidable.
Speaking strictly for humans, the cost of reproduction for women always has been higher. She is the one who is saddled with 9 months of pregnancy, followed by the necessity to care for an utterly helpless infant for years. This task, while not impossible to do alone, is light-years easier with Dad involved to procure resources and provide protection. Therefore, it’s in her best interest to be more restrictive when selecting a mate. Compounding her need to be choosy is the fact that she has a limited number of eggs and therefore a limited reproductive lifetime. She doesn’t want to waste scarce and precious resource on the wrong guy. Men, on the other hand, produce zillions of sperm from puberty until death and they’re all raring to be deposited in the nearest vagina, the more the better. Men, intrinsically, have a very low cost of reproduction. No pregnancy, an endless supply of sperm, why not go nuts? That is certainly one strategy that evolved (the “cad”). Fuck as many women as possible, banking on the fact that at least a few of the babies will survive after you love ‘em and leave ‘em. The other strategy (the “dad”), will stick around and help care for the baby, giving it a better chance of survival. The rub with this strategy is that dad only has an incentive to stick around if he’s reasonably certain that the baby carries his genetic material. Otherwise, he’s squandering his time, resources and opportunity cost taking care of someone else’s kid. On the flip side, mom is putting all her eggs (so to speak) in this guy’s basket, so she wants a guy with as many resources as possible. Resources often come along with strength and status, so women want those qualities.
From these few simple rules evolved basically all the pomp and circumstance surrounding human mating behavior. You see, the rules of the game are hardwired into us from thousands of generations. Despite progs’ desire to create the New Soviet Man, you can’t handwave away these realities and any changes to them will necessarily have to happen over a long period of time. Social engineering is a miserable failure when it comes to sex (and, well, pretty much everything else too, but that’s another article).
Modern Sex Pre-1960
Now we reach the crux of this piece, a survey of modern human sexual behavior as a consequence of these biological realities. Before people start throwing autistic fits, I’m fully aware that there are a multitude of other arrangements, lifestyles and aberrations to these rules (see: Sade, Marquis de); however, I’m working in averages here and looking at the most prevalent mating styles. I’m also not going to touch ancient societies with things like sacred prostitution, matriarchal societies (which, BTW, have never really been conclusively proven to have existed), “walking marriages” etc. Basically, I’m going to deal with post-Enlightenment, Western sexual relationships because that happens to be the world we inhabit.
Everyone had so many kids…
Humans are often cited as being unusual in the mammalian world for our penchant for monogamy. Many social critics claim that this is an oppressive social norm forced on women (always specifically women) by the patriarchy to enslave them into becoming breeding cattle. I argue that this is utterly wrong and human monogamy is a direct consequence of concealed ovulation, paternal uncertainty and the complete uselessness of human children for the first 5 years (at least) of life. All of these factors put humans at the extreme end of the K-side in r/K selection (go look it up, I don’t have the energy to go down that rabbit hole). Yes, it doesn’t change the fact that men still have those zillions of sperm raring to be ejaculated in new and interesting places; it also doesn’t change the fact that women want a man with as much wealth, status and resources as possible, but as I said before, monogamy is a compromise on the part of both parties making the best out of a bad situation. Many men still would occasionally satisfy their deep-seated biological urges with low-risk third parties (like prostitutes) in which the chances of yet another woman making demands on his scant resources were minimal. Likewise, women tolerated this because it was a low probability of him leaving her holding the bag. For their part, women would encourage (read: nag) men to improve themselves and their social station to try and make more money or gain more influence. The perfect picture of domestic bliss.
Monogamy is an odd institution because it’s simultaneously natural and unnatural. As I’ve said in previous essays, humans are like onions; we have layers of conflicting desires built one on top of another from the various parts of our ancient evolutionary brains. Our reptilian, mammalian, neo-cortical and spiritual sides are all locked in a battle royale. On one hand, it’s natural for a man to want to stick it in every hole he can find, but on the flip side, it’s natural to want to care for your offspring to ensure their chances of survival. For women, on one hand, it’s natural to want to find the man with the most possible resources (the king or chief), but in that case, you’re most likely going to be competing with several different women for his attention. Therefore, it’s also natural to want to find a decent guy with decent resources who won’t run away and you have all to yourself.
The major rub here is that sex, love and reproduction were all inextricably linked. It was very, very unlikely that you have one without the others coming along for the ride. Our very hormones themselves alter after the birth of a child (for men and women) making it much more likely that mom and dad will stick around and care for that helpless little blob. These are things that are hard-wired into us. You’re not going to change it, at least not with current technology. However, that playbook; the one that got us from the Savannah all the way to airplanes, interchangeable parts, the polio vaccine and indoor plumbing got completely torched with one invention.
The Pill
Those of you who read my previous piece will already know that I consider this to be the most Earth-shattering, life altering invention ever in human history. First approved by the FDA in 1960, this little pack of hormones made possible things that humanity never before dreamed of. Sex, love and reproduction, arguably the most formative phenomena of human evolution, were no longer linked. The world envisioned in Stranger in a Strange Land (published one year after the Pill was approved) was not speculative; it really was possible for people to live in group marriages and sex communes without the messiness of children entering the picture.
And that’s exactly what people did. With gusto. Like a college kid going on a bender at his 21st birthday, the drought was over. No longer would the chains of biology enslave us and repress us. No longer would we have to choose between plodding bourgeois monogamy and family or celibacy. No longer would women have to be so circumspect about who they took to bed. No longer would men have to think twice about having a one-night stand with that hot girl he doesn’t really like that much but has a great rack. As long as she’s on the Pill, all bets are off; no harm, no foul. Everyone gets their various rocks off, then walks away as if nothing ever happened. As easy as playing a game of Gin-Rummy but more fun.
“Intentional communities” (I really hate that term) like Sandstone (counting The Joy of Sex author Alex Comfort and Sammy Davis Jr. as members) and Kerista sprung up practically overnight. The Summer of Love and Woodstock firmly established that consequence-free casual sex and promiscuity were here to stay. The swinging 70s moved it from young free thinkers into the suburbs and the bourgeois community at large. Key parties and swinging became part of the cultural lexicon. Ordinary people began to question what radicals and academics had been questioning for decades; are the expectations of matrimony, nuclear family, monogamy and fidelity a scam? Why do we voluntarily subordinate our urges to outdated social structures? Why do we put a higher value on responsibility and commitment (which can certainly be a drag sometimes) than we do on pleasure, fulfillment and liberation? And the clarion call that still resonates to this day “IT’S NOT NATURAL!”
As stated above, this is true. It’s also not true. It’s also irrelevant. The human situation is one that is much more complex than any 60s sexual radical could conceive of. The millions of years of evolution leading us to this point has, again, created many contradictory urges within us. The onion-like human psyche is far more complicated than than a philosophy of “if it feels good, do it” can contain. But, easy pleasure is a siren song that is very hard to resist. One immediate social consequence of this revolution was a drastic increase in divorce. No doubt, this was a life saver to many people in lousy marriages, but to others it was the first inklings of the “broken homes” and “mixed families” that are ubiquitous today. The mainstreaming of so-called “alternative lifestyles” (another term I hate) would probably have continued apace except for one unfortunate complication.
AIDS
To middle and late Gen-Xers like myself, I have never known a sexual world that did not have the specter of these four letters hanging over it. Previously, STDs were a mild inconvenience. Picked up the clap at the sex party last weekend? Just go get your shot and you’re good for the party next weekend. Even permanent diseases like herpes were NBD; just rub some cream on it and wait for the acute outbreak to go away.
But what a way to go…
Now, however, there was a badass new kid on the block and he wasn’t taking shit from anyone. No vaccine. No cure. Bringing about a horrible, painful, slow and humiliating death. It definitely changed the landscape of relationships and sex toward the more conservative. It’s an interesting coincidence that it just happened to occur during the Reagan Revolution and the New Moral Majority. Since anal sex was and is a much easier way to contract the disease, and since, on average, gay men tend to have more lifetime sex partners than straights and lesbians, AIDS first exploded among male gays. This was not only devastating to the community at large, but adding insult to injury, Social Conservatives used it to take potshots at gays calling AIDS “gay cancer” and “divine retribution” for their “deviant lifestyle”.
People like myself who came of age at this time were relentlessly bombarded with PSAs about how sex will kill you and, if you decide to be an idiot and have sex in spite of our warnings, don’t even *think* about not using a condom; you might as well just give a .357 a blowjob. It’s telling about the overwhelming strength of uncontrolled human sexuality that it took the threat of death to reign it in. Monogamy, sexual restraint and conventional family, never completely abandoned in the first place, came screaming back to overturn the sexual revolution for one brief moment, because the perceived alternative was Russian Roulette. This image was not helped by the fact that many prominent individuals known for their promiscuity contracted and/or died of HIV (Magic Johnson, Eazy-E, Liberace, Freddy Mercury and, more recently, Charlie Sheen).
However, time marches on and human ingenuity is a wonderful thing. New drugs and treatments started cranking out and, while initially very expensive, have become more or less available to anyone that has contracted the disease. Magic Johnson has been living with the virus for decades and seems as healthy as ever. HIV/AIDS was no longer an automatic death sentence; if, in fact, it was ever as big of a threat as it was portrayed in the first place. Some conspiracy-minded libertines maintain that the AIDS scare was trumped up as worse than it actually was to try and purposely counteract the promiscuous tendencies of the previous two decades. Regardless, it had the intended effect until the mid-late 90s when all of a sudden it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal anymore. Sleep around, but use a condom; it would definitely suck to catch it, but if you did it’s not automatically the end. You take drugs for life and, in some cases, the virus won’t even be detectable in your blood. You can even have HIV-negative children using advanced reproductive technologies. The beast of human sexuality was not completely unshackled as it was in the 60s and 70s, but it was let out of the cage and given a long leash.
Tinder, Hook-Ups and #metoo
So here we sit. The sexual revolution mostly back in full swing, so-called “alternative lifestyles” are very much en vogue again. To be fair, people were swinging, making “arrangements” with their spouses and creating sexual sub-cultures all throughout the AIDS scare, but it was definitely more underground and seen as dangerous and shameful. Now, these choices are out in the open big time and sometimes portrayed by the intelligentsia as superior to plodding, bourgeois monogamy; a middle ground between the new ground rules of non-child-bearing recreational sex and the continuing desire for stability and family. Perhaps it’s true. I suppose time will tell.
Sexuality among adolescents and young adults went through a secondary revolution of its own. It’s completely ridiculous to think that teenagers and students weren’t constantly having sex for centuries before the current era. However, many times these unions would involve quite a bit of emotional seriousness due to the looming specter of pregnancy. People married young and typically stayed married. The new rules of sex, intersecting with technology, made having sex more similar to ordering a pizza than a complicated dance of courtship and emotions. In many ways, the sexual revolution had reached its ultimate goal; totally unfettered, (mostly) consequence-free sex on demand. Just swipe right and you’re off to the races. For large swaths of young people, intercourse had become akin to a handshake.
As stated, and the theme of this plodding piece of mental excrement, is that human nature is never so simple and it’s not easily altered. You see, going along with the Savannah Principle (the idea that our brains haven’t changed much since the days of Oog and Ug), doubts, fears and general despair and dysphoria began to creep in to this arrangement. In spite of what the sexual revolutionaries had been saying for decades, intercourse is *not* a handshake, and even barring the physical consequences of pregnancy and disease there are emotional consequences of sex.
Recapping from earlier, on the Savannah, Oog and Ug have intrinsically competitive sexual strategies. This can be traced back to the fact that Oog has to carry the baby, then birth it and take care of it. This all comes at the a huge economic and physical cost; all to produce one lousy human. Ug, while his urges to impregnate as many women as possible are very strong, he also must protect his genetic legacy. Human babies are so useless for such a long time that there is a much higher probability that they will survive if they have two parents looking after them. Compound this with the fact that women have a much higher reproductive economic value; finite number of eggs and only able to carry one baby at a time vs. men’s zillions of sperm and ability to impregnate a theoretically arbitrary number of women; and further compound it with concealed ovulation and parental uncertainty, we have quite a complex social situation. Nature has concocted a cocktail of wonderful things to overcome this complexity; female orgasm, penis size, oxytocin, vasopressin, sexual jealousy among other things combine to bond mates together with strong emotions.
As if things weren’t already complicated enough, men and women are both hypergamous; ie: they want to “marry up”. This means very different things to men and women. Women’s reproductive value is derived from beauty and youth, so men want to find young, beautiful women with whom to mate. Men’s reproductive value is derived from strength and capability at procuring resources for mom and baby, so, in the old cliche, women prefer a big wallet to a big dick. I don’t pretend to have all the answers to these complexities. There are entire philosophies inquiring on the nature of love. Love, lust and sex have probably motivated the creation of more art than anything else in history (with the possible exception of religion). In drastic understatement, human familial relationships are very complicated. It’s no wonder there would eventually be a backlash against the often simple-minded form that they take today.
#MeToo
At first started by women coming out to claim that they had been victims of rape/assault and were too ashamed to say anything until now, it has now morphed into a sinister condemnation of male sexuality. Acting like a tactless boor is enough to get you #metoo’ed and potentially put your family and livelihood in jeopardy. Again, at the risk of over-simplifying, this can all be traced back to women giving up their leverage in the sexual marketplace. The ingrained biological behaviors from the Savannah cannot be forgotten or dismissed so easily. To put it bluntly, pussy used to be scarce and expensive, now it’s plentiful and cheap. The supply and demand have been drastically altered from the way things were for essentially all of human history up until 50 years ago (less than the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things). Men behave like boors and expect easy sex because those are the new rules of the game. Men have always wanted easy sex, but the possibility/likelihood of pregnancy incentivized women to keep pussy scarce and expensive; after all, they had a much higher cost associated with sex. This was their leverage, and it was the most powerful leverage known to humanity. Women have always had the upper hand in sexual relationships because of this, in spite of what pop culture and half-baked feminist theories argue. Women certainly got a raw deal when it came to political freedom and, in some cases, arranged marriage. I do not trivialize the treatment women sometimes got as second-class citizens. These were strategies concocted by male-dominated institutions to try and wrestle some control back from the omnipotent vagina. But, it is always in vain because pussy is the ultimate trump card. Men want it. Women have it. And women ultimately decide who gets it, in spite of social constructs designed to contravene that power.
#Metoo, in my opinion, is a reaction by women who find they don’t especially like the results of the revolution. They feel cheated that they no longer have that leverage, even though their Savannah brain is telling them they should. They feel used and cheap and, in many cases, through no fault of their own, they are. To try and win back some of the control they lost through biology, they now are, consciously or unconsciously, using the apparatus of the State and public shaming to try and reel in male sexual fervor. I’ve always thought it self-evident that male and female sexuality are different, but complementary. Men are the engine and women are the transmission. Men are filled with drive and energy and power; a walking hard-on looking for a hole. Women channel that energy from unfocused sexual excess into a sublimation of productivity, art, engineering, etc. Thus things have been since G-d said, “Let there be light”. Now, the transmission has lost its ability to direct the power of the engine; running out of control, the engine tears apart millennia of tradition, family structure and personal motivation. Both sexes perhaps should be more careful what they wish for.
The ultimate purpose of this tome is not to answer any questions, provide predictions or suggest how things can be “fixed”. There *is* nothing to fix. Things are what they are now. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube. Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps some new, even more badass STD will (likely temporarily) push people back to their old ways of sexual restraint. Perhaps the swingers and polyamorists are right that monogamy no longer has a purpose and will be phased out, paving the way for group marriages or some other such arrangement. Due to the hard wiring in our brains, I doubt this is something that would happen on a large scale anytime soon, however. More likely, we’re going to continue escalating the sex war to some kind of breaking point. What comes after that is anyone’s guess. We are indeed cursed to live in interesting times.
I said to myself, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.’ But that also proved to be meaningless. ‘Laughter,’ I said, ‘is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?’ I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly […] I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well—the delights of a man’s heart. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me. I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
– Ecclesiastes, Chapter 2
We all stand at a precipice. Not the Chicken Little, world is coming to an end, “society” is falling apart, WHER MUH KUNTRY DUN GON precipice; but a personal precipice from which each and every one of us could step off and fall at any moment. This, of course, is true now, has been true in the past and will continue to be true forever. The human condition is a precarious one; one of constant challenge and grief and suffering and boredom. In addition to the standard, garden variety existential crises we continue to experience, sex, love, family, death, tribe, legacy, purpose; all have transformed rapidly while simultaneously not transforming at all. In fact, it is precisely because humans have not changed and cannot change at the same pace as their environment that we face unique challenges today our ancestors didn’t. At the risk of being overambitious (as well as sounding insufferably pretentious), I’m going to attempt to analyze one aspect of modern Western existence through the lens of my pathetically layman understanding of Kierkegaard. Buckle up buckaroo.
Preamble
“Who is Søren Kierkegaard and why should I give a shit?” “What’s with that stupid O with a cross through it? Seems vaguely communist…” “What the fuck am I reading this for? Show me some cheesecake pics, clown!” are all comments that are likely spinning in your head at the moment. Question 1: I’m getting to it, settle down. Question 2: In English it’s called a “slashed o” and it’s a diphthong “oe”-type sound. And it’s Scandinavian so it probably is a little commie. Question 3: How the hell should I know why you’re reading it? And don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll include lots of tits in the comments.
Despair, Not Just For Moody Teenagers Anymore!
Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher. He was THE Danish philosopher; Danes are crazy about the guy and I can understand why. He is generally considered to be father of Existential Philosophy. Existentialism in today’s world is typically associated with nihilism and emptiness. However, at its core it’s actually quite simple; it starts from the assumption that the individual is the beginning and the end of the philosophical question of what comprises a life well lived. It rejects that meaning can be derived from any collective, be it societal or religious. The nihilism enters when people are unmoored from these waypoints of existence. Freedom is profoundly uncomfortable, especially when it is the very meaning of your existence at stake. You must make and accept authentic choices of existence then live with those consequences. This is why over the years existentialism gained a reputation of being dark and meaningless; it wrestles with the question of what happens when you remove any bedrock metanarratives from an individual’s life.
It would be impossible, both in theory and in practice for a dolt like myself, to summarize the entirety of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in such a forum, but I will do my best to outline it for the purpose of this short piece. Suffice it to say that he is a man of great contradiction; he spearheaded a philosophy dedicated to liberating man from metanarratives and authoritarian diktat, but he was extremely devout and religious acceptance is key to his understanding of living well. He was passionately in love with and engaged to a woman. He also spoke very highly of marriage in his works as being a proper ethical duty to all people. Yet he inexplicably broke it off with her in a very callous way, causing her to nearly be institutionalized from the intensity of her heartbreak. In fact, much of his work shows he never got over it; he begged her for forgiveness for years, even after she had married someone else. Finally she and her husband fled the country. He was a recluse of towering intellect, but once got into the 19th century equivalent of a flame war with a third rate satire magazine for their unattractive cartoon of him. I personally find him to be one of the most fascinating figures in history.
In the smallest of nutshells, Kierkegaard’s theory of existence hinges on a metaphysical model of the human essence as two competing parts, the finite and infinite. The finite part encapsulates our mortal nature; physical, carnal, material, covetous and demanding. The infinite part is that touch of divinity endowed within us by our Creator; the transcendent, non-corporeal and eternal. Furthermore, his definition of the “self” is, as he calls it, “a self becoming itself” through the irreconcilable conflict between these two parts. The self is an ever-evolving thing that is utterly unstable and, frequently, miserable.
Kierkegaard was the first to explore the concept of existential angst or in his terminology, despair; the sickness unto death. Despair is a cornerstone of his philosophy in that every living human experiences it, and hardly anyone ever resolves it. He divides the human experience into three types of despair: being unconscious in despair of having a self, not wanting in despair to be oneself and wanting in despair to be oneself.
The first is despair born of ignorance that there is an infinite part to the self at all. Think of your favorite vapid celebrity or the clueless idiot at your office or any one of a million other examples. This would, in my estimation, be by far the most common type of despair in our world. The second type of despair is a refusal to accept any self beyond immediacy. An individual realizes that there is an infinite part to the self, but that realization is so distressing it must be immediately suppressed with finite pleasures.
An individual in the third type of despair has full recognition of the infinite part of self. However, this person refuses to acknowledge that the only way to reconcile the conflict between the finite and infinite parts is recognition of the self’s complete dependence on “the love of the power that created” (typically seen as G-d’s love, but open to interpretation).
Kierkegaard openly acknowledged that this was not something that could be understood logically and that a “leap of faith” (he coined the term) was necessary to resolve the despair inside. Once the leap of faith is made, one becomes either the Knight of Infinite Resignation, or the Knight of Faith depending on that individual’s level of actualization. It’s important to note that the Knight of Infinite Resignation is still in despair because his leap of faith has left him empty and nihilistic. This is the ultra-Reader’s Digest version of Kierkegaard’s metaphysical philosophy.
What. The. Fuck.
I know right? It’s totes coming together now! OK… that may have seemed like a pointless slog, but I promise I’m going somewhere. The types of despair outlined roughly correspond to Kierkegaard’s stages of life. This connects his metaphysics to his aesthetics and his ethics. Kierkegaard envisioned that there are three stages of life; calling them stages may be a bit of a misnomer because they were not necessarily sequential, you could return to a stage later in life and not everyone hits all of them. They consisted of the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage and the spiritual stage.
The prototype of the aesthetic stage is the seducer; an individual devoted to worldly pleasure and the avoidance of any commitment or responsibility. This is most closely associated with the first two types of despair. The prototype of the ethical stage is the spouse and the parent. One in this stage accepts responsibility of action and makes commitments as an ethical obligation to those around him. Typically the third type of despair and the Knight of Infinite Resignation are in the ethical stage. In the spiritual stage is a person who has fully resolved the existential crisis, taken the leap of faith and become a Knight of Faith. This is kind of like attaining enlightenment.
Still Not Understanding What the Point of Any of this Is…
OK, for those few who read my comments on the site outside of the titties, you’ll know that the inspiration for this piece was an article on RealClearLife extolling the virtues of sex parties as a replacement for relationships while living in the shadow of #metoo (article here). I have long been fascinated by the conflicting priorities our reptilian, mammalian, neo-cortical and spiritual parts place on us. I’ve always considered humans to be kind of like onions; we have a lot of layers built on top of one another from all the billions of years of evolution and all the shifting demands placed on us. We have carnal, venal and insatiably destructive appetites on one end, and a yearning for meaning and spiritual understanding on the other (sounds a bit like those finite and infinite parts eh?).
The principal point here is that, as a species, a culture, a “society”, whatever you wanna call it, I see us more in despair and further from enlightenment each day. I must remain mindful of the so-called “good old days” fallacy, but I think my reasoning here is sound. I’m far from a SoCon and, as usual, standard libertarian disclaimers apply; live however you please and in accordance with what allows you to look in the mirror each day and be satisfied. These are simply my observations and conclusions and not meant to be seen as judgements being passed.
I strongly believe that if you are attending sex parties as a substitute for authentic relationships, you are deeply in Kierkegaardian despair. I do not see this as an isolated phenomenon either. The addiction to the immediacy, the refusal to acknowledge anything beyond the physical, the constant need for dopamine stimulation; it’s all a way of shielding one’s eyes from the Void. Kierkegaard says that when confronted with the Void, we should all have “fear and trembling” and be deeply uncomfortable. Running from that discomfort to immerse ourselves in physical pleasure is not an authentic response. Though it would be just as easy to talk about smartphones, I’m going to pick on sex here because it is the most consistent, biological way to feel euphoria and distract oneself from the Void. It has also been subjected to, IMO, the single most revolutionary development in the history of mankind: the Pill.
More than antibiotics, more than anesthetic, more than powered flight or interchangeable parts or nuclear power or the Internet, I believe the Pill has done more to fundamentally change the human experience than anything else, ever. See, we’re still on the African Savannah 50,000 years ago you and I. Not literally, of course, but from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains still are. And outside of basic survival needs like food and water, there is no stronger drive out here on the Savannah than the reproductive drive. That *is* your purpose. Mate. Copulate. Fuck. Make and raise babies. Beyond that, there is nothing else.
How do I know that we haven’t moved from that point? Because you watch porn (so do I BTW). If the brain had kept pace with technology, porn would hold no sway over anyone. Our brains would understand that it’s just an image of a receptive sexual partner and not one in real life, thus, not arousing. In fact, if you were a cis-het male shitlord, you’d be utterly uninterested in any woman on the Pill because your brain would have evolved some way to distinguish and identify a woman who is not fertile. The same reason that women after menopause become much less alluring, women on the Pill would have some inchoate quality that would turn men off. Concealed ovulation, year-round sexual receptivity, men’s zillions of sperm vs. women’s finite number of eggs; these are all physical adaptations that serve mating strategies following a playbook that has remained unchanged for millions of years. The Pill took that playbook and put it through the woodchipper.
The Pill and the subsequent sexual revolution has mind-fucked us. We have now opened the door and allowed our deepest, most basic urges to run wild and have free reign over our lives. Never before in the history of mankind has such a cornucopia of fleshy pleasure been available to such a wide spectrum of the population with so few consequences. Previously, rampant copulation inevitably resulted in parenthood and increased responsibility. Our very biology alters our hormone levels (male and female) upon becoming a parent. In the past, only monarchs could have such excess in their lives as we do now; which brings us full circle to the quote at the beginning of the article. Ecclesiastes is widely attributed to King Solomon, a man with hundreds of wives and concubines, massive wealth, beloved by his people and still he struggled with the despair Kierkegaard describes. Maybe, just maybe, he actually struggled with it more…
Our access to easy pleasure and distraction has given way to a species-wide naturalistic fallacy; if it’s natural, it must be good. While it is, at a fundamental level, natural to be as promiscuous as possible (or as acquisitive as possible, or as gluttonous as possible etc. etc.), it is fallacious to assume that doing so is automatically good. Speaking from a Kierkegaardian perspective, the easier these pleasures become, the *more* despair people should feel because we are regressing further away from resolving the crisis of finite and infinite. We immerse ourselves in the finite, as Solomon did, and find our lives wanting.
Under no circumstances should this be interpreted as a condemnation of modern medical advances and the abundant wealth that technology and capitalism has provided. By every possible measure, our lives are healthier, wealthier, more comfortable and longer than ever before. What it should be interpreted as is a warning and a reminder to acknowledge your infinite self. Those conflicts and the Big Questions are always there, hovering in the background no matter how many sex parties a person goes to. Refusing to acknowledge those questions and resolve them in an individual manner means despair. I don’t necessarily think that Kierkegaard was a prophet whose prescriptions for living a good life are universal.
However, I do think each person must try to find their own way to live a good life and I believe that an individual is ill-prepared to do so if constantly distracted by the immediacy of the finite. I agree with Kierkegaard that each person does have a spark of divinity inside and we ignore it at our peril. I would like to see more people living in less despair. Now shut up and let me look at boobs.
This is probably not going to be a happy or fun piece. Death is sad. It represents the great unknown; the termination of our fragile existence into something we know not what. It is permanent; more permanent than anything else we deal with in this world. And it causes overwhelming emotions of loss, grief and sadness. Suicide adds many additional dimensions to this. When someone 
These edge cases certainly don’t justify nullifying the larger principle of self-ownership, so I feel comfortable declaring suicide to be ethical from a libertarian perspective. (Reminder: ethics are derived from external codes of conduct and morals are principles on which an individual’s judgement of right and wrong are based; they are intertwined but not identical). If libertarian ethics are derived primarily from the NAP, then I can’t see how suicide is unethical. I believe as libertarians, we have to reserve the right of people to terminate their own existence. After all, your own self is your most fundamental piece of property, and you can dispose of your property however you wish. To say that you are partially owned by your loved ones opens the door to slavery. If one really wanted to construct an ethical argument against suicide without referencing religion (which is easy: G-d said not to), you’d have to fall back on deontological arguments. One 
And that’s exactly what people did. With gusto. Like a college kid going on a bender at his 21st birthday, the drought was over. No longer would the chains of biology enslave us and repress us. No longer would we have to choose between plodding bourgeois monogamy and family or celibacy. No longer would women have to be so circumspect about who they took to bed. No longer would men have to think twice about having a one-night stand with that hot girl he doesn’t really like that much but has a great rack. As long as she’s on the Pill, all bets are off; no harm, no foul. Everyone gets their various rocks off, then walks away as if nothing ever happened. As easy as playing a game of Gin-Rummy but more fun.
I strongly believe that if you are attending sex parties as a substitute for authentic relationships, you are deeply in Kierkegaardian despair. I do not see this as an isolated phenomenon either. The addiction to the immediacy, the refusal to acknowledge anything beyond the physical, the constant need for dopamine stimulation; it’s all a way of shielding one’s eyes from the Void. Kierkegaard says that when confronted with the Void, we should all have “fear and trembling” and be deeply uncomfortable. Running from that discomfort to immerse ourselves in physical pleasure is not an authentic response. Though it would be just as easy to talk about smartphones, I’m going to pick on sex here because it is the most consistent, biological way to feel euphoria and distract oneself from the Void. It has also been subjected to, IMO, the single most revolutionary development in the history of mankind: the Pill.