The Octopus Taught Me Too

"Where there is liberty, however, appetite and ambition are released, doubt is encouraged, and evil becomes manifest in diverse and unforeseeable ways. In free societies, children and parents, siblings and friends, professional colleagues and business associates all become potential sources of highly unpleasant surprises."

― Glenn Tinder, "Liberty: Rethinking an Imperiled Ideal"

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Dear Kate,

Maybe the best version of human togetherness is what we are having now, dreaming a good nightmare that is democracy.

No parent would ask for a crippled child, but if to stay home is to stay safe, any distinct personality, especially of colorful type, should better pay the moral price of living in a social mass and be suppressed and obscured for its own and common goods.  I know children, adult children, who in the last two years have not left home more times than their fingers could count.  Imagine their parents.  Unimaginable how they will be forced to be free again, if ever.

Another maybe: maybe the trouble is we are making too big a deal of our supposed togetherness.  If finally there is no transcending meaning to everything, why insist on anything other than your share of the pie?  If I want to stay home, crank up the thermostat, jerk off to thrill and bliss random and free, and spray this land of plenty with the primal reality that is my private rendering of a life well lived, who is there to tell me there is more to life than the simple rhythm of my busy hand?

Last night I watched an Oscar-winning documentary "My Octopus Teacher," a "love story" between a lonely, apparently (to me) antisocial man and a very antisocial sea creature, and felt the urge to take all the beautiful undersea footage, replace the running commentary with mine, and turn the whole thing into a hate story, or at least a meaningless one—as we are told how life is by the best observers of our world, the most brilliant scientists.

According to the renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes."

Near his life's end, Charles Darwin gave a state of his being in an autobiography: "My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grind­ing gen­eral laws out of large col­lec­tions of facts, but why this should have caused the atro­phy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I can­not con­ceive. A man with a mind more highly organ­ised or bet­ter con­sti­tuted than mine, would not, I sup­pose, have thus suf­fered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and lis­ten to some music at least once every week; for per­haps the parts of my brain now atro­phied would thus have been kept active through use...The loss of these tastes is a loss of hap­pi­ness, and may pos­si­bly be inju­ri­ous to the intel­lect, and more prob­a­bly to the moral char­ac­ter, by enfee­bling the emo­tional part of our nature."

I wasn't being cynical when I said I wanted to eat the octopus: I just couldn't think of a better use of it, all meaninglessness considered.  I am sure the octopus wouldn't think twice if it finds me just as appetizing and necessarily so to answer to her primal reality.

I know you are scratching your head now, screaming, What the hell are you trying to say then?!

Let me be a good documentarian and give you the comfort and closure of my commentary on my beautiful babbling.  What I tried to say is this: liberty is not only dangerous, it might not even be desirable—if possible at all.  To insist on meaning is to impose a vision of positive liberty, of human flourishing.  Do it to yourself if you want to, as long as it doesn't trouble the rest of us.  Do it to anyone else, it gets political, becomes a religion...or a sappy documentary.  We might give you an award and say it's a job well done, but please leave us alone.  This is meant to be a democracy after all.

Yours, Alex