Solitude and Neanderthals

Solitude and Neanderthals

There was a time in my late 20's when I didn't know shit about life and I was awash with idealism and compassion, so I volunteered to work the phone in the suicide prevention hotline office. I thought I would be kind and try to save lives. Little did I know humans were strange. Callers didn't want to talk to me. They claimed I was hard to understand because of my accent. I didn't last a week on my unpaid, voluntary part-time weekend "job". Then it dawned on me, the life I saved should and would be my own, and the fuck with everybody else's. If people wanted to die, that was their fucking problem, not mine. The funny thing was that getting rejected on the basis of my heavy accent was macabre and yet ironically a good thing for me. I started working on my articulation and diction and went on learning more foreign languages just to get psychologically balanced. And I accepted my solitude better. I stopped feeling lonely and sorry for myself. Now I enjoy being by myself. I spend my time reading, trying to improve and fortify my mind. The more I read, the stronger I feel. Nowadays I walk slowly, feeling serene and amused and cynical. I could be all wrong, but I think I finally have figured life is all about. We are all little islands connected by phone and email, forever cut off by pride, ego, misunderstanding, and stupidity. We fail to understand one another. We project ourselves onto others without politely being patient and inquisitive. We assume, assume, and assume, making an ass of ourselves to the point nobody bothers to point out our errors of perception. We wear ego-protection vests. The more stupid and unaccomplished we are, the thicker the vests. I am amazed and astounded by the questions untalented, stupid, ignorant people have thrown at me. I ask myself, "Where do these creatures come from? Caves? Are they really Homo sapiens or descendants of Neanderthals? And then I laugh---not at their faces, of course not, I am too polite for that, although I want to---in the privacy of my high-rise condo. From where I live, I can see hordes of Neanderthals go about their business down below, each one of them looking smug and proud, but I know in their heart of hearts, they are filled with anxiety and barely suppressed anger and overflowing depression and cowed by life. Now and then, some of them couldn't hack it anymore. They would whip out their cell phone and breathlessly shout to whoever on the other side---not me, of course not, I am the one with "heavy accent", remember?---"Help me, please! I can't go on anymore. I want to die, but too scared to do it."

As I pointed out to a woman this evening, there are only two areas that differentiate true humans from pseudo-humans: 

1. The ability to think deeply, to the core and marrow of the matter. 

2. A good firm grasp and practice of ethics and morality.

The rest of qualities such as power, fame, wealth, looks are of no importance and totally irrelevant in being considered if a person is qualified to be judged as a true human.

So who are you? A true human or a stupid chimpanzee who can't think for yourself, can't be bothered with logic, with philosophy, with science?

The more you think about mathematical logic (the one Russell and Frege initiated and Wittgenstein took over, not the antiquated more than 2,000-year old Aristotelean logic) the more you get to the frontiers of thinking and the nature and limits of philosophy as well as the nature and limits of language. 

The first thing you must admit is that you don't know shit. That's big progress right there. Then we start from very beginning, one step at a time, away from darkness and closer to light. But if you start asking me to prove to you---like the stupid VAW and you know who else have done---that I am a real Homo sapiens and not a monkey like you, then we both, more you than me, have a problem. 

I was a monkey once, but I was a smart monkey. I knew, admitted to myself readily, that I didn't know shit. No true human needed to tell me. I had eyes and ears and a brain to figure out what was going on around me. So I started going to the library and started hitting the books at night. There was no human teacher. I just invented the wheel by myself, one night at a time, one step at a time. I am almost out of the dark cave now. I'm seeing glimmers, slivers of light at the cave's mouth a few hundred yards away. I couldn't wait for the day I reach the cave's mouth and know what full light is all about.