Post-Miserabilist Absurdism
Affirming meaning in a losing game
Dragonsphere Report
I went to a Rationalist meetup associated with Astral Codex Ten recently, and somehow got to talking about gnosticism and philosophical pessimism, Schopenhauer, and related intellectual and spiritual currents. This piqued the curiosity of someone who then asked me to describe my own philosophical worldview. For want of an already existing term, I coined on the spot the label of “Post-Miserabalist Absurdist”. As far as I know this term didn’t exist until I invented it, but of course there’s nothing new under the sun so I wouldn’t be surprised if some obscure academic paper came up with it long before me. If so, please recognize that I am putting it to my own use here, which may be worse than prior use but at any rate is entirely mine.
Absurdism of course belongs to Camus, and Miserabalism in its purest form perhaps to Cioran. I have read moderately of both of these authors. Camus in particular made a big impression on me: we live in a Godless universe and it is our job to affirm meaning against the chaos that exists in God’s absence. This is not an idea unique to Camus, of course. Nietzsche could be said to be writing on similar themes. And currents of it present themselves in various forms throughout history, with Voltaire’s Candide being an especially clear example in my mind. The chief elements of my worldview can probably be summarized fairly succinctly:
Absence of God or of God as an authoritative source of meaning
The importance of creating our own meaning
The truth of some of the worst forms of philosophical pessimism (non-existence would generally be better in utilitarian terms than existence; the ugliness of existence is committed to the immutable ledger of time even in the case of our own beings, etc)
In essence, I would take the general thread of Absurdism as it already exists and update it against more damning charges than it necessarily addressed in its own time. Life is not just meaningless, it is not just not worth it hedonically, it is actively hostile to hedonic utility, it is actively hostile to the creation of meaning and personal narrative. In essence, life is a matter of falling behind repeatedly in all things until one dies. Of being overwhelmed by the stochastic but inevitable onslaught of challenges. It is like being a gambler running the Martingale Roulette System: You may swing up, but you are bound to lose, and in this case there is no running away from the table. Not to cut your losses nor to collect any chance winnings. Only the certainty of negative expectancy awaits you.
“It can always get worse” is a truism that is sometimes hard earned. But the reason it is possible is because human beings are resilient. Natural selection and economic growth has made quite a lot survivable. The bankroll people play with and inevitably lose is not just any wealth, nor even any ability, but ultimately their mental and spiritual constitution as well. People are whittled down. Maybe not all at once. A doctor once promised me, however, that there is no such thing as a dignified death. And everyone dies. I don’t mean to deny that people swing up, that people get ahead. They do it even as groups sometimes. I merely deny that the long run expectancy of life is positive. If people did not die I think this would become more apparent. I think, more or less, that the only thing necessary to cast man into hell would be to leave him to his own affairs in a deathless world.
But though this is anathema to meaning, though the very grounds of meaning are actively eroded by it, it is still important to create meaning against this backdrop. There is nothing else that can validate life in any sense. There are large portions of life that are not valid, but the painful and partial reclamation of meaning is still beautiful. In fact, it is the only possible source of beauty.
People hate the miserable, because misery is adjacent to failure and to death. But misery is the last possible triumph over death before death begins triumphing. There is no misery without the capacity to believe in meaning.
This graph captures the basic intuition: meaning is an inverted parabola mirrored across the positive and negative axes of happiness. It extends, presumably, to infinity in the case of positive happiness, but with negative happiness there is a discontinuity where the mind’s capacity for producing meaning simply breaks and the organism dies. Meaning is how one lives. The breaking may not come as quickly or as absolutely as this, of course, and there are other problems with the graph, but the important concepts are the partial symmetry and the discontinuity.
It would be better to keep a person happy than for them to persist in misery, but as long as they remain miserable they will surely persist. Misery is underrated in this sense. When people intuit it to reflect a downward trajectory psychologically, they rightfully recoil. But it could easily represent an upwards trajectory, or even no trajectory at all.
Since meaning is self created, people can fight heroic battles to stay miserable against conditions that would annihilate others. The trajectory of a person’s psychology need not correspond to the negative expectancy of the material factors of life or the experienced downswings of life of any given measure. On this basis it is conditionally valid to affirm even the worst perspectives on life simply because they represent the continued generation of meaning and hence the continued will to live.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report