Written out of some frustration and plenty of boredom. I took a dialectical materialist stance on the meaning of life. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

There is no real purpose of life. Is it personal happiness? No. The happiness of one often consists in the selfish, antagonistic destruction of another’s. But what of love? There are those firmly opposed to it, in any variety. Even those who indulge in, and partake of, love must surely hate those who hate it. And there are many who hate love, especially if expressed in a way not to their cultural tastes or personal bias. Should we settle for a more broad, societal, world happiness then? The purpose of love would then be to do as much good for the world as possible, to contribute to the sum of humanity’s happiness. But what then, what rests? History is testament to how little interest there is in this comparatively modern concept: world peace, world joy, world hope. Indeed. Increasing the stock of happiness through political means is the age-old skeleton of tribalism with lipstick.

So we reprimand ourselves for obsessing over the past, and so we gaze at the future. What is the point of human happiness? Is it good that humans are happy; is it bad that humans are sad? (Take this path of inquiry to both its extremes, What is good? And what is bad?) These are arbitrary, human concepts with no agreed or settled definition. One’s good is another’s bad, and vice versa. If there is no absolute good, then we can only be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as far as our mental boundary of society allows. How sure are we that this immediate happiness does not consist in the anguish of another who lies outside this natural ‘knowledge limit’?

Or perhaps we invent a device which gathers the collective opinion of the whole of humanity on this blue marble. Every thought, every behaviour of a single person is put to the universal vote – it is passed only if everyone is happy with it, and is rejected even if a single man is unhappy about it. Green is yes, Red is no. Assuming this two-button device exists in the hands of every individual, the veto is the only way that upholds the highest, most stringent standards.

(For now we allow the notion of those incapable of voting – babies, the mentally impaired, etc. – to pass. We also let the fact that voting become a person’s life to pass, since a whole society doing nothing but vote would make it a deliriously boring and intensely dire one, on top of raising a whole set of cultural, moral and material implications impossible to conceive.)

It is likely that his life will be doomed. He will do precisely nothing. That poor man on whom we execute our experiment on will be trapped in inaction, because at least one person will be affected. Opening the lid of a peanut butter jar would be met with considerable objection, by say, the wife of the factory worker whose hands was amputated by the machines and would not allow anyone to support the company; or the Greenpeace campaigner who decries the polluting, exploitative and wasteful practices of this industry; or the Republican or neoliberal who cannot countenance the cushy subsidies the F&B industry receives. Every one of his decisions, from opening that jar of delicious spread, to turning on his laptop to work in a cubicle, to trying on a certain pair of pyjamas at night will not work. As shown, this device makes the personal, by definition, political. And when a decision is political is it ossified. Action itself is immobilised.

Of course we expect certain shortcomings to this universal device. The most problematic one, if not most encompassing one, is free will. What if people decide not to vote? They abstain from pressing either Green or Red. The solution is simply that we consider an abstinence – an imaginary ‘Yellow’ of sorts – a Red just as well. Because we have adopted the most stringent system of voting, no ambiguity is permitted. What if people decide to quit this system? We have to subject even their exit to the vote: and the result is that because some pharisees feel most obliged to exercise their moral ‘duty’ of watching over everyone’s conduct, and so deny them exit. They are not alone, because really, everyone is a pharisee now.

We exit the scene, having done enough chaos with one person’s life and not willing to impart the same suffering unto others. What emerges? A sharpened sense of self-determination. We were previously in judgement; now we realise how we are creators or our own right. This is not divorced from culture; rather is adds thrust to a sense of self-belonging as well. Life and our own existence, if either concept can be understood, does not by definition compel us into, or constrain us with, something we do not want to do. There is now free will; there is now no grand purpose. We do what we want, just that we do it as we have been doing.