Bored in Heaven
Utopia is heavenly and heaven is utopian. Both eschatological, proposed end-states, which purport to alleviate man of what ails him. No privation, no want, no desire, protected and propagated, forever. Sounds perfect? As current state consistently falls short of reasonable expectation then perhaps we should accelerate the approach to our promised land? “For our existence resembles nothing so much as the consequence of a misdeed, punishment for a forbidden desire.”1
The human yearning for utopia is omnipresent and cross-cultural. But, like all human inventions, it is poisoned by fault.
Desire is the natural state of that with a will-to-life. If all desire were satiated, to sure an extent were even the next arising desire were preemptively satisfied, then an inescapable cloak of undying boredom would replace it.
Everything worth doing involves sacrifice and struggle. Nothing which brings meaning to our existence was not as the result of some expenditure. Furthermore, the cost of the effort often correlates with the meaning it bestows upon the creator and witness.
Boredom is perhaps the only state of being that is comparable to pain. Boredom comes in many shades. There is the boredom of the man without self-motivation which is why, for the majority of humanity, leaders are so necessary. There is the boredom of isolation, solitary confinement being a torturous punishment is proof enough that boredom is a perverse kind of hell. The boredom of a wasted life, which accompanies the dinner conversation of many unhappy marriages. There is also a boredom of abundance, the paralysis of choice, this is the boredom which grips you when you have the ability to read any book ever written.
The constant buzz of rhythmic music is ever-present in public commercial spaces to ward off the very real threat of silence. “[…] for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence […]”2
If we follow the axiom that everything follows material conditions then our sense of fulfillment should correlate with the alleviation of privation. However, we know demonstrably from the contemporary situation that this isn’t the case. The entire current of materialist-analytic philosophy, Capital culture, anti-spiritualism, sex positivity and globalist culture falls afoul of the McNamara fallacy.3 Every effort in the direction of these trends leaves behind something human. Something which avoids the boredom of numbers, spreadsheets and contraception.
Schopenhauer characterizes “life” as a “task”, the task of “maintaining itself” and rightly concludes:
“If this task is accomplished, what has been gained is a burden, and there then appears a second task: that of doing something with it so as to ward off boredom.”4
Due to the conditions which make life possible this “something” must be the maintenance of those conditions. If the work is accomplished and conditions frozen is unchanging stasis, there remains no point to life. Luckily, the nature of the universe is one of constant change. Lest we literally die of boredom.
“Utopia […] some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is.”5
Unlimited sustenance and maximal morality-free autonomy. Yet, people still kill themselves in loneliness and boredom. The cure to boredom will never be found through “scientific fetishism” in which blindly progress toward the crescendo were “methodical purification actually replaces the original richness of experience”.6 “Purification” of the world means the death of man.
Striving, struggle and privation are directly connected with the meaning we attribute to our existence. Dear reader, is there a single important event or act in your life that didn’t involve discomfort, pain or sacrifice?Superabundance is great, we all have all our desires met. Superabundance means nobody has anything of any worth.
“We take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something”7
Of course, genuine striving involves stress. Stress has a physiological effect on our body, the embodiment of stress is not merely mental. The drug cortisol is released into our body, by the body itself. Fight-or-flight is an intoxication which requires no dealer. We are biologically hardwired for stress and striving. Habits hold the circuit of humanity in congruence and deviations from our routines are indications of heightened stress,8 utopia imagines an existence devoid of any schedule.
We can only come to one conclusion: If man no longer had the struggle of protection and propagation he would create problems so he would have something to do.
If utopia were achieved, surely man would destroy it.
Schopenhauer, A. (2014). Essays and Aphorisms. Translated by Hollingdale, R.J. London: Penguin Classics. p.49 On the Old Testament.
Ibid. p.53 On the Vanity of Existence.
Named after Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 and the failure of the Vietnam war: to base decisions solely on quantitative factors. On the contrary, the human animal is distinctly qualitative.
Ibid.
Ibid. p.43 On the Suffering of the World.
Mannheim, K. (2015). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Wirth, L. and Shils, E. Martino Publishing. p.17
Schopenhauer, A. (2014). Essays and Aphorisms. Translated by Hollingdale, R.J. London: Penguin Classics. p.53 On the Vanity of Existence.
Navarro, J. (2018). The Dictionary Of Body Language. Harper Thorsons. p.57