On Amorvera

Linguistic Anthropology informs us that meaning is crafted by human cultures. This means that before human culture crafts meaning as a mode of assigning values to concepts and things, there is no meaning, no value, to anything. The world is then just an absurd chemical reaction, without any intelligence or purpose behind any of its structures other than what it cultivates through the generation of species.

The entire world being absurd means that as organisms, we are tied to our morphology and psychology only as much as we cannot change these things. Our morphology is incredibly restrained, but as human beings, the ways we can use our hands and use tools to make machines that are essentially extensions of our morphology leave us with limitless forms to interact with to liberate us from the restraints of our bodies. This will undoubtedly be pushed further should we gain the rights to self-design in a transhumanist future.

As for our minds, they are almost completely adaptable. Though we entrench them in personas that are ultimately of our own making, these can be changed and modified with nothing more than a change of thought. Cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis, my own methods of persona modification, even ecstatic transcendental religious experiences—these things can all transform a mind and change a person’s foundational behaviors to act like a completely different person entirely.

So, humans are a strangely liberated species, and thanks to the absurdity and meaninglessness of this world, we are free to craft for ourselves whatever meaning for life that suits our interests. Though our interests are collected and curated through matters of taste and individuation, they are ultimately absurd, and so no instinctual disgust or attraction to ideas is set in stone but is ultimately relatively attractive or disgusting based on the culture we find ourselves in.

One could imagine the whole of society being wiped out and starting over but with upside-down values and an upside-down economy, where giving and freely working were the methods, and so the ethics that restrict those behaviors would become our virtues—of hate, discrimination, and cruelty. To prevent the all-giving nature of this new gift economy, they would worship sadistic gods who would promote painful taking rituals so people would not thoughtlessly give all they had and be left with nothing.

In this upside-down economy in an upside-down world, things that disgusted us before the flip would start to become oddly attractive, and things that used to be attractive would be seen as disgusting, gross excesses of altruism and love—the kinds that would leave a person with nothing and without any real means of giving anything more to the rest of society. The sages would go about selling and stealing, and this would seem like some sort of enlightened reversal of the established order. The churches would sell life insurance and pray for the day that the endless giving would end, and a glorious heaven of taking and hedonism would return.

But this is not the case, nor is it the desired outcome. For the world needs balance. Though we are in a capitalist excess and have been for the last 4,000 years, this does not mean going the other way entirely is right just because it may seem attractive. Peace, love, and altruism seem like good ideas on the surface, but temperance in ethics is just as necessary as temperance in spirit. So the world, as an absurd sorting method of resource acquisition methods, is imperfect in this and requires the pragmatic effort of minds to do the final balancing to bring the culture to equilibrium with its own methods—meaning our ethics should be a cautious and tempered charity and tolerance, without taking it so far that we lose competitive value and our hospitality leaves us at a disadvantage where we can bring no justice.

So, the absurd world around us, with our absurd ethics, all lead us to the way things are as close to desirable as it does, and we then tend to be attracted to improving the way things are to be more tempered and just, and so we call this temperance and justice “good.” Whatever that may be for whatever society, in whatever geopolitical reality they find themselves in, it’s all equally absurd. The structure that forms out of this absurdity does so first by serendipitous self-organization of economic forces, but then is “polished off” by intelligent human reasoning and moral insight.

From the foundational generation of the universe on the base of quantum phenomena to the constitutional structure and international relations of states, the organization of structures in the absurdity of the universe can become whatever we need it to be as a human species—but only as fast as we can renovate our infrastructure, deploy new technologies, and adapt our social paradigms to shifting ideologies and ways of life. The real limits of change are based more on our willingness to expose ourselves to the discomfort of change than the physical realities of economic forces.

And so, when looking at the absurdity of the world, we can attach either disgust or attraction to it, depending on how we see the world. We can be disgusted by the cruelty of having to find our own way without guidance and everything being inherently futile, or we can see the beauty in the freedom—that we get to find our own way, and we are lucky to have our meanings and values be just as true as any other. We can look at the world in its absurdity as equally absurd, equally attractive or disgusting, and so I choose to see it as attractive.

I choose to see it as worth saving, worth loving, worth revising. I see the diversity of people’s attempts to understand this world and make arguments for how things should be as a beautiful diversification in the limited minds of every person. This choice to see the world positively, to see it as worth working towards bringing to temperance and justice, I call Amorvera—a philosophy of choice and agreement with the process of the world as a progressively refining system. Even as it buckles and breaks under its own weight and ignorance, it is stress-testing the systems that are, with what is realistic, spurring new innovations to bring the system back to structural justification and temperance.

But I acknowledge that this choice is absurd—just as absurd as the choice to keep living or keep dying. It is simply the more natural choice for me as someone who has given more than I have taken, and at the end of the day, I know most people who take more than they give will feel a despair or at least a somber acceptance that things are the way they are, like it or not. A change in our economic and legal structure that opens people to more opportunities to give, a change in education about the nature of the world through some cultural movement—this could change people’s outlook.

As mentioned before, all human tendencies can be changed and inverted given enough tolerance to change and intelligent effort to bring the world to temperance and justice. But we will see how things go. Humanity can become anything, so we may enslave ourselves with our own economies and technologies. We may still end up in a Machiavellian nightmare where no one is free and everyone is forced to do things that disgust them. It all depends on what people find more attractive—waiting for others to save them, which will result in nothing being done, or taking a risk now with their own lives to try and make a better world. If we do not mature as a species, this absurd world may yet become an absurd hell of our own making, but if we can, there is no reason we ourselves cannot make a heaven on Earth where temperance, peace, and justice reign.