Sentient Meat
I always like arriving late to the party, but for once, I was actually ahead of the pop culture curve and finished True Detective with everyone else when it ended its run a couple of months ago on HBO. One of the best shows that I have had the pleasure of getting swept up in, and the best part, for me, was the philosophical dialogues given by Rust Cohle.
Almost all of his philosophical points resonated with me (from his Nietzschean aspects on eternal recurrence, to his quip to Marty about the average IQ of the people attending the revival tent, to the excellent line, “we are just sentient meat”) save the last one, the one where he and Marty are out of the hospital in the last scene of the last episode and as Rust is lighting up he is recanting his earlier held beliefs. That part rang false for me if for no other reason than it smacked of another intellectual show cashing out for a “feel good” Hollywood ending that would not leave people with a pessimistic sour feeling.
I think that anyone, when faced with their own mortality, tends to do a certain sort of “bad faith” renegotiation of their belief structure, that is, if you don’t believe in some religion (I honestly do not know what people who believe do when faced with a near death experience, perhaps it just reaffirms their belief structure and it all falls under, “God wasn’t ready to bring me home yet”). I think, for agnostics and atheists, this portrayal of a near death reevaluation of one’s belief structure (especially when one is talking about this character who was so sure, so ready for death’s sweet release) is a cop out. Personally, I don’t seek any benefit when I die save for an end of this existence and a return to the void where my time is over and I decompose back into the universe.
This very thought, faced with an abyss of nothingness, used to scare me, it provoked high levels of anxiety and doubt and concern over my human condition and my desire for some form of sentient immortality. During these anxious moments I wholeheartedly embraced Platonic theory (the closest to any form of religion I could allow myself to follow) for comfort. Then at some point I just let it go. I realized that a majority of human experience is filled with suffering, regret, anger, and despair. Yes, there are some highlights that help break this cycle, but for the most part, this curse of being sentient meat is filled with strife.
By embracing that life is hard one cannot be let down by unrealistic expectations, such expectations offered under the false hope of religion. Religion, like everything else, is corrupted by the human desire to deny what we are, to deny that we are simple animals who are cursed with the ability to know what we are, and then we spend all of our years denying a simple truth with the sweet deceptive lie of “life after death.” That is just too much to handle for me, I embrace my nature as a temporary human consciousness in the vast cosmos that gets a brief time to enjoy contemplation and try to leave some sort of legacy to my child. When one accepts this, accepts the strife, strives to do some sort of “good” and then passes out of what we term existence it becomes much less a pessimistic outlook and one of the greatest forms of life affirming optimism that one can hold close.
Anything else would be hypocritical bullshit.
