An anthropological study of the Grek: Or how jail-bait is a proof of reality.

Not too many years ago, I used to drift from place to place and party to party, and not always in the circles of the over-fiends I conspire with now. These sorts of parties were the standard kind you can hear on just about any suburban street on a Friday night – shitty music, hooting, hollering, screams and the sporadic sounds of smashing glass and upheaving gullet. Ever-present were the clutch of under-aged girls the hosts were trying to liquor up and impress with their access to booze and/or car ownership (that sacred thing to a fifteen year old – the internal combustion engine!), invariably in a single solid herd, tittering away and fortified in the ancient herbivore defence of Safety In Numbers. And the time would come in the evening when, having drunken and smoked much of the prerequisites for a free-flowing tongue and an “open mind”, several of the fellows would attempt a siege and assault on the fortress of feminine propriety with their most awesome weapon – their minds. Thus begins the Drunken Philosophy Hour – that obligatory time at any bad party when the Grek bang their rocks togethers and try to produce some sparks of enlightenment in order to light the tailor-made of the young girls’ passions and hopefully take a drag through the filter of underaged sex.

“Every so often”, a Grek much of this type spake unto me with ponderous wisdom born of age, “A video game comes along that will change the way mankind thinks.” Trying to restrain myself in order to find out the punch-line to this joke, I put on my best (terrible) poker face and held it just long enough to find out that he was talking about an X-Box game based on “The Matrix”. In my total inability to not react to this kind of stimulus I may have dreadfully offended the fellow, but it put me in mind of the arguments deployed in dozens of drunken sieges I have borne witness to over the long years.

Standard in the arsenal of the Grek philosopher is the idea that reality is a fantasy in one way or another. Actually, it’s pretty common just about everywhere, and to some extent just about everyone believes that some component of what goes on about them is complete fantasy (yes, I did write three hundred words just to segue to the question at hand). I’ve heard arguments for varying levels of unreality throughout my many years of undergraduate course barely-attendance, from a staggering array of people I’ve wanted to punch in the face. But the most clear-cut, honest arguments come from the Greks, and since I’ve always kept quiet around their philosophy groups (mostly because I don’t want to ruin their chances of picking up since I’m not in the market for girls much younger than me, and as Tess points out, I was generally with Tess already), I’ve gotten to hear much more of what they have to say without having the urge to step on their necks.

The most common argument of the Grek (and young men in general) is solipsism or some variation thereof, that idea that they are the only entity in the universe. In fact, the word itself is derived from the Latin, solus ipse (oneself alone). To the solipsist, the Universe is simply the machination of their own mind. It’s popular because it’s basically a clearance-priced, entry-level belief system that allows everything to be explained in a way that is hard for the layman to argue against. Nonetheless, it’s very easy to kick holes in once you detect that this philosophical wall may be made of plaster rather than bricks. The question can be raised as to why his mind would differentiate between dreams and reality – since they’re both products of the same mind, why do dreams not impact on what the solipsist’s waking world? Another question – if his mind is able to compute the position and convincingly keep up the appearance of complicated systems such as city traffic, not to mention the movement of every single atom in the known universe at all times, why does he keep drunkenly misplacing his keys? Finally, how does he account for the working of things that he knows nothing about, like nuclear weaponry or reading? The solipsist may answer these, and other questions, with the theory that it’s just the way his mind has set out reality, but he won’t do it very convincingly. Solipsism is such an unsatisfying way to view the universe because it essentially relies on this single article of faith. Since it flies in the face of pretty much all evidence to the contrary that things are actually going on that don’t involve the solipsist in any way (and the vast majority of it entirely without his knowledge), fails to predict any phenomena (and especially muddles up cause and effect, making him look and actually become stupid), and makes him very unpopular with his friends who don’t fancy themselves figments of a teenager’s imagination, the solipsist usually ditches this world view over time. Solipsism really is a form of madness, and anyone who is able to cling to this tenuous ground for more than a couple of years in their youth usually turns into an obese, forty year old, terribly single man wearing a foul-smelling wolf-shirt, posting smugly to dozens of internet fora. Luckily, solipsism turns people into fortresses of mad belly-gazing, easily bypassed, but if you’re particularly worried about a solipsist you know, I was told a tale of a sure cure. A farmer was troubled by a young solipsist as he walked through the forest at the edge of his property, and tired of having his arguments dismissed as the product of the young man’s mind, he seized up a pitchfork with the central prong missing and pinned the young man to a nearby tree by the neck. He simply left him there all night, and when he came back the young man, finding that no matter how he willed himself somewhere else, kicked, screamed or tried to use his mind to summon help, found that he could not control reality as he thought, and was ready to renounce solipsism.

The Matrix and related arguments are also popular. The proponent of this argument posits that there is an actual reality, just not this one. It’s a little harder to solve with a tree-pinning, although it may help anyway. It’s a bit of a post-modern hipster’s wet dream, until you point out that it’s very similar in principle to any religion that incorporates the idea of a soul (and therefore not much cooler than Christianity, really). It’s also not much more satisfying than solipsism, as it fails to predict any phenomena and is based on a completely untestable theory – an article of faith, as it were. There is much more evidence in support of a real world – in fact, the only evidence we have is based in the real world, and it seems to point out that the real world is- real. Matrix and religious arguments are pretty much based on speculation over what happens if you eat the red pill, or die. Whatever.

In support of the real world, and against the repeated maulings that the Greks, wide-eyed undergraduates and internet fatsos have worked upon it in my presence, I would like to posit my theory, for the first time ever. My belief is that there is an absolute real world, and therefore an absolute truth. This seems to be supported by some small amount of scientific evidence. This belief in an actual physical reality can be, and has been tested, and allows prediction based on my understanding of a few physical laws that, while outdated, seem to hold (I refer here to Newtonian mechanics, the extent of my knowledge of physics). It is my understanding that we are connected to this physical world indirectly through our senses, which reaches us through the filter of our perception. I believe that we are good to the extent that we are able to trust and refine our senses, and knowledge is only good to the extent that these senses are used in its discovery. This knowledge clears our perception and allows us a closer link to the real world – to truth. On the other hand, knowledge or belief gained by the denial of our senses is called solipsism and religion – it is a form of sickness that leads us away from our senses and away from truth. Because the real world is not only hard to discover through the fog of our perceptions, but also hard to bear in its lethality and seemingly arbitrary treatment of those that dwell on it, it is far easier to develop belief structures that deny the real world in favour of something else, be it the safe harbours of post-modernism or religion, or the sense of control that can be found by drawing reality entirely into the mind.

We, I am incapable of directly perceiving the real world. We have all been socialised from birth to perceive certain stimuli in certain ways, to pay too much attention to this while ignoring that, and so on. Perhaps Nietzsche was closest to the truth with Zarathustra. In Ecce Homo he gives a short, sharp definition of the Overman:

“The species of man [Zarathustra] delineates delineates reality as it is: he is strong enough for it- he is not estranged from or entranced by it, he is reality itself, he still has all that is fearful in reality in him, only thus can man possess greatness...”

Our senses are our only tools to delineate reality, and to the extent we can rely on them, we are healthy. To the extent they cannot be trusted, that our perception calls them into doubt, that we cannot believe our eyes, or ignore the whiff of gas on the air, we are sick. The most profound sickness is to cast aside the senses as worthless, to long for another world or withdraw from it entirely. So to those that retreat into fantasy, who despise reality, who wish to recast themselves as the central actors in a world based on their disease – who want to poison others- I say, Get a Grip! Open that window and let some air into your room! Rise from your deathbed, change out of that pall and start clearing the cobwebs from the senses! Go for a walk, and if your perception causes you to trip over and tear your clothing on sharp branches, it is part of the process that will help you start to open your eyes after all these years. Or, just stop breathing altogether, and finally test your theory of another world beyond this one. Only in these ways will the Overman become an inevitability. In other words, we must cast aside the clouds in our perception and become a lens through which the truth may pass and be magnified.

I feel that I have been unable to express myself properly in even this long an essay, and I beg your pardon if little is to be wrung from this work. But here I return you at long last to where we began, at the drunken party where the siege is starting to succeed. Cracks are appearing in the walls, here a child has been separated from the herd and is led away to “discuss” the Matrix Trilogy further, there more liquor is arriving and another girl slumps down, utterly drunk and hemmed in by a trio of solipsists, all agreeing amongst themselves that each other “would say that” even as they fiercely contest the carcass. Amidst their denials of reality they affirm – vigourously! – their true, underlying belief in the physical universe. In their clumsy and round-about attempts at reproduction, they act towards the great, overriding biological imperative – that ancient truth, shaded in the perceptions of the Grek by thousands of years of taboo and excommunication. In practicing solipsism and demi-religious beliefs as a means to reproduce, they bow before the force of reality at long last, and bring an unknown number of bastards into the world. Yes, this is the real world. No, it’s not fantasy. We’re just looking at it through eyes encrusted with the accumulated sleep of aeons.