"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Basically, replace science with relativism, and this is what he's trying to say. It doesn't make a lot of sense because he's a philosophical pessimist, and unless you accept philosophical pessimism, they tend not to make a lot of sense. But I'll try and explain it anyway. It sort of goes like this.
1. Right now, the world's a relativist.
2. But you can't maintain relativism for ever.
3. The opposite of relativism is absolutism.
4. Therefore, the world will eventually seek another form of absolutism.
5. But that's the opposite of relativism, so the world will contradict itself.
The underlying assumption that sort of makes it make sense is the philosophical pessimism. That's why it's not just the world changing its mind or just a natural cycle between more absolutism vs. more relativism. Philosophical pessimists tend to think in universals, and the universals are always horrible anyway. So even though there's no real reason to choose relativism over absolutism, because everything sucks so one's no better than the other, they tend to pick something and then say the other thing is bad. That's until the other thing happens, then it's good and the previous thing is bad.
The basic thrust of philosophical pessimism is that consciousness, because of meaning, is a problem. Well, and suffering. Buddhism deals this one way, philosophical pessimism just assumes that if there's suffering and a quest for meaning you'll probably never solve, existence itself is a problem. That's why it can talk about contradictions being a problem and why A is good now and B is bad because it contradicts A, but then when B comes, A is bad because it contradicts B.
Essentially, the contradictions, even if they're held by totally different groups of people, are one of the reasons philosophical pessimists believe we can't find meaning, because again, for them everything is in universals, so "meaning" isn't something I can find and you can find and somebody else can find in various things or ideologies, but *a thing* that we all either find or don't. For the pessimist, we don't, and that quest causes us pain, along with lots of other stuff. Personally I don't get philosophical pessimism at all, it seems ridiculous to me. That's partly because I disagree with it's basic ideas, we can find meaning, and partly because it overemphasizes stuff, if I'm playing a game, there doesn't need to be meaning in it beyond, I'm playing a game because I enjoy it. It's no great mystery in need of a solution, or a distraction from the sufferings of life, or whatever.
But our boy Wing is a philosophical pessimist, so all of this stuff is a problem for him. It's not for me because I like to keep things simple. Today we walked down to the Indian place an got Indian food for lunch because my wife decided she wanted samosas. Simple. No great mystery, no big rigmarole about suffering, we decided Indian food would be yummy, so we went and got some, brought it home, and ate it. In case anybody was wondering, yes, it was really yummy. So was the beer I had with it that had cardamom and ginger and stuff in it.
I'm not trying to suggest that there's no deeper meaning to stuff or anything. I'm not suggesting that people don't have questions, or shouldn't. I just don't agree with philosophical pessimism, you can include existentialism here too I think, that the fact that we exist poses some kind of fundamental issue. But then, I pretty much side with Shinto. The gods/spirits/powers gave us the world, and it's pretty awesome. We should thank them for it.
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"rabbid dog aggressive attitude" since 3035. THE SYSTEM IS TRAP!