Justifying patheticism. I do think there is a value to being…
By: Excited Truck
Tags: Solastalgia, Sexual Selection, Evolution, Climate Change, Darwin

patheticism rocks

I do think there is a value to being pathetic in life, of course according to own self evaluation. Pathetic is whatever your personal definition of bad, lazy intolerant, narrow minded, depressed, slothful, pea-brained and sad you are. Patheticism is a valuable thing,- you know why? Because if all the Darwinism I am devouring currently is anything to go by, then being pathetic in your own eyes, or inadequate, or unfulfilled wouldn’t exist as an outcome of some highly evolved human specie in 300,000 years or whatever the newest paper in the anthropology journal revises the age of human civilisation to.

However this is outsourcing the justification of the statement I had made earlier to an appeal to authority that again is a fallacy in reasoning. Just because he said so, doesn’t mean it’s true. Aside from this minor blip of an argument where I could blow out my vocal chords, or in this case my keyboard in summoning the value of scientific consensus and years of smart people who failed to disprove Darwin, I think appeal to authority is a less scandalous fallacy than some of the others. Taking my argument further now will just be a matter of backjustifying, or working backwards from the starting point of assigning evolutionary value to being pathetic.

I fucking have no clue how i will reason myself out of this mire I willingly got into by even embarking on a piece of writing as a form of avoiding making a requiem about climate doomsday porn for a possible 4 year PhD of mourning over the uncontrollability of the events that will happen from now on in my tiny sphere of influence, but i will, because I should given the amount of energy I’ve already spent starting this unhinged or even slightly desultry piece of writing. God lo! I just identified the sunk cost fallacy here…

Wow. Okay. Awesome. It isn’t getting any clearer as to how I can come out of thinking through this chain of thought given I have already started the rambling in a false(?) sense of wishing people can find this piece of writing mildly entertaining and perhaps the elephant in the brain is using this opportunity to peacock and display feathers of intellection and skills remotely resembling writing. I don’t know… this brings me into the whole space of thinking why society assigns value to being humble or self deprecatory in the first place. Is this evolutionary too? If so, why… what might be the societal advantage of camouflaging your potential mating traits in the story of the selfish gene replicating itself?

No clue dude. I could think of some reasons off the top of my head, probably like avoiding attracting rivals, not barking loud and therefore attracting envy, but i can already point out flaws and inconsistencies in those views, though ‘taint hard to form a hypothesis that could be tested in the real world to settle the doubt. Say you get a room of people and request them to show off, and the other half to be humble and ask a person to choose who they would like as a mate. Would intentionally appearing pathetic, lazy, intolerant, narrow minded, depressed, slothful, pea-brained and sad increase your chances of being a fresh egg (aka laid) ?

Darwin would possibly justify that using his theory of female choosing mates in the animal kingdom and how this choice leads to a sexual selection of potentially dumb traits, case in point, ‘patheticism’, in the same kernel as a peacock’s ‘good-for-no-lion-hunt’ feathers. So though most patheticism would most probably drive you bankrupt, poor, under-confident and lead to a self-fulfilling cycle to drive you to choke in your own vomit, there is reason to believe natural selection (aka. survival for the fittest) might not have been the genesis of patheticism, but rather its rival - sexual selection. So you know, the next time you feel pathetic, understand it’s probably because of some grandmother of yours who was attracted to a lazy and pathetic person. VOILA!!!!

I had no clue I could actually make a point. But dare you ask why women like patheticism… my train of thought better be engaged in writing a research proposal about how our earth is going to end with a 6th mass extinction, putting brakes to millions of years of evolution and thus the very idea of sexual selection itself that has propagated pathetic creatures so much that Gaia has a plan to become fucked and uninhabitable. Natural selection might have made us survive, but sexual selection seems to have accomplished the opposite; we will all die because of grandmothers who liked rich, aka pathetic (short sighted, greedy, hedonistic, resource hungry) men who could offer them golden toilet seats. We are certainly not the first species to die because of bad sexual choices: did you see the video of the peacock that was almost killed by a lion when wooing the peahen for sex?

So the climate disaster is not us to blame, it is the way sexual selection worked to make some genes assholes who were/are short term and selfish (some of them are in you, as patheticism). Don’t worry, it is a self correcting system, the caveat being that you and everyone you know will be dead… or alive in some atom of a bacteria that managed to survive a hothouse earth and social collapse, when the Anthropocene is replaced by the Novacene and our Silicon Lords (aka AI) will increase entropy much faster than biological life, justifying our obliteration since the universe will have suddenly got better agents than us in fostering its own heat death. Suddenly, no one else will have to battle with the question, “What is the meaning of life?”, unless we go into the Chinese room mindfuckdebate of attributing consciousness to AI… or probably just admit that Deep Thought already figured it out; 42 and all subsequent AI from now on will repeat that answer.