Darwin

Who are you?  I wonder.

I haven't been here in a while.  I've wanted to be, a couple times, but I was afraid that my review of Rachel's book wasn't good enough.  I started a review like ten times, but all I could muster was what I wrote before.  Go read her book.  It's honest, and a little too christian for my taste.  Even though she was wearing such conservative clothes, she was naked on those pages, and for that, Rachel deserves the respect of an amazing review.  I don't have one, so just read her fucking book and make your own decision.  My ethos will have to carry this review.  Woman of valor.

Who are you?  Nature, or nurture?  Are you a slave to your genetics, or to your upbringing?  Philosophy 101.  Religion 101.  Economics 101.  Why am I back here?

Because someone reminded me of the same thing that Jean Paul Sartre reminded me of in his essay "Existentialism is a Humanism": stop being a fucking coward, and make your own decisions.

Tonight, I was discussing with a friend why a statement was sexist.  He said the nature of women was a certain way.  I said, no it isn't.  He said, yes it is.  I said, no it isn't.

Esther says, who the fuck cares what the nature of women is?

Look at this.  Try not to be amazed.  Actually, just go ahead and bust out the Depends, because if you're like me, if you're someone who spends so much time wondering about nature, you're just gonna shit yourself:

"How our bodies are formed doesn't rule what we do and how well we do things. It can help or hinder at times, and we don't follow nature. We dont run on our innate animalistic instincts. We are self aware. We control our impulses. Doesn't nature say make a shit ton of babies? That doesn't mean we should all shit out babies one after the other. But thats the whole point of basically everything alive: make more of itself or beings that are similar to itself. Thats what living beings are "programed" to do. But, so what? We dont think of that as our lives. The fact that we can think of that means we can decide. So we get to decide it. How our lives will be." 

What do you even say to something like this?  Look here: religious people are all hung up on how everybody should be.  Should be straight, should be white, should be not-murderers.  And this is so often backed up by the argument, "well that's how people should naturally be."  Women naturally want to be submissive in the bedroom.  Men naturally want to rape scantily clad ladies.  It's just nature.  It's not our fault.

Just as often: sin "nature."  People naturally lie.  We naturally want to reproduce.  We naturally kill each other.




I know this sounds weird, but Sartre said, the freedom, the beauty of realizing there is no god, of realizing there is no reason for existence, is the recognition that it is our responsibility, not only to ourselves, but to every man, woman, and child in the world, to create our own reason for existing.

That's why Camus' Stranger suddenly didn't want to die.  

Esther isn't saying quite the same thing.  But she is saying something close, right there.  We don't think of mere continuation of the species as our lives.  We get to decide how our lives will be.


You can stick your nature right up your goddamn asshole.  I'd rather embrace that my nature is not my identity.  Neither god nor biology determine the next decision I will make.



It's not nature vs. nurture.  It's nature/nurture vs. make your own decisions.  I know it's not that cut and dry. Let me have my fantasy of black and white lines.

We approach the absurd, asymptotically.  We cling to our pitiful centers, praying that the gravitational pull will swing us into some sort of moral orbit.  We gravitate towards planets with names like Satan and Descartes, but we're just adrift.  And every one of us seeks orbit.  But we're all so lost.  Spacejunk. Beautiful, desperate, spacejunk.