Climate warming, far right rising, democracy eroding, huges setbacks un humain rights, hate crimes exploding, biodiversity dying, activism more ans more criminalized, etc…it seem society is living its last moments, and doomerism looks like the only rational option. So what prevent you from being a doomer despite all of this ?

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago

    https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16. Myth of Sisyphus.pdf

    All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

    I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

    The gods cursed us to roll a rock up a hill. We don’t know why and they probably don’t either by now. I push the rock because doing so makes me hate them more effectively and at some point I might become strong enough to kill them for that. If I was arbitrarily born into 18th century France and my rock was to starve for the aristocracy, I’d push it because there’s a guillotine over the horizon. I’m arbitrarily born into the late 20th century and my rock is to starve for the corporate aristocracy, I push it because I or someone like me will get to turn their bunkers into brazen bulls. At no point in history could I have been born without some rock to push and it’d always mean existential damnation for me, but I’d purify my hate pushing it.

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 days ago

        Even if I wasn’t an absurdist at a universal atheistic level, it’d be hard to be a communist without being an absurdist at the societal level Camus is writing at. Trench warfare and line go up and electoralism are absurd things which drive you crazy enough to believe in them if you can’t admit how arbitrary and meaningless they are. When you break from that idealism, Camus has the right confrontational framework for what comes next.